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Shark Weeks and Triangle Weekends: AnAcidemic Summer Reading List

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 It's Shark Week on Discovery; and the ingeniously original "Sharkfest" on Nat-Geo (Streaming on Disney+!), in other words, more than ever, it's the right time to stay home in the AC, reaching to the slimy bottom of of your nigh-empty COVID excuse bucket to ward off pool and beach invites. By now you've gleaned summer is my least favorite season, I loathe the sticky heat (being half-Nordic). I am a big fan of doing the Huysmans A Rebors style beach trip, i.e. moving my easy chair so I can doze off with the afternoon sun hitting me square in the face through a (closed) window, coconut oil below my nose (to give the illusion of suntan lotion), eyes closed, the roar of the shark show surf swimming in my ears... the resultant sensory canvas all but gives me that sudden drop ghost feeling you get sometimes while dozing off after spending a long time frolicking in the surf, all with the AC blasting.  So you know the drill. I'm a big fan of the shark week and the shitty-CGI-hottie-scientist Syfy channel shark movies, which have been slyly crushing the Bechdel test right in front of the unwitting faces of 'the Man.' I could write everything I've written all over again, but instead, to make it easy for you, dear reader, I've rounded up a list of everything you need to surf.... safely limb-wise, but dangerously psyche-wise:

(Nov. 2013)

The point is, SHARKNADO comes along, and a Ferris wheel rolls into the side of a four story international style apartment building like it's no big deal. Charlton Heston might drag that Ferris wheel roll out to three hours, but this film rushes along past it. Sharks in the bar, sharks in the traffic jam; "It's like old faithful!" as water shoots up from the sewers. "We're gonna need faith to get through that" over a flooded dip under an overpass. A douchebag boyfriend of the sulky daughter says: "Even if it is the storm of the century, Beverly Hill's rescue services are second to none!" And then he looks out the window, sees a shark in the swimming pool and before he can react a wave crashes through into the living room and his head gets bit off. And there was much rejoicing. If you ever played the game as kids where you had to be halfway up the stairs or on a chair or couch to avoid getting eaten by a carpet shark then yes you are in bad movie heaven. If the leader of the survivors, Finn, is a typical bleeding heart idiot who has to stop to help everyone, even school buses that look empty. "This is your problem, Finn!" bemoans the weary ex-wife (Tara Reid) - and we kind of agree, but then Boom! Turns out --there's scared kids in there, and a TJ Miller-ish bus driver way out of his depth! You saved another busload from the shahks, Finn! (more) 

(August 16, 2014)

That Fin was an ex-lifeguard gave him an excuse for his chronic rescuing out west. His idiot desire to rescue his family before they knew they were in danger was offset with a Hawksian sense of real time and tidal surge momentum. We followed the incoming flood from his bar on the beachfront to the boardwalk, the parking lot, downtown, and inland and up into the Hills. A tangible rainy vibe was to be found in their impromptu getaway car; the windshield wipers and radio traffic delays, snarls and very LA dialogue about traffic ("I hate the 405") meshed perfectly with the conversation on where to go from there, creating a vibe familiar to anyone who's ever left a drunken party with a new maskeshift tribe piling into the car to head off to a second location.  We had John Heard as the comic relief, bashing sharks with his barstool; barmaid Nova (Cassandra Scerbo - above left) brandishing shotgun and shark scar backstory; wingman Jason Simmons helping with the heavy lifting and car rentals; Finn doing the posturing. Together they raced with the inward tide as it filled the streets and stalled highway traffic with sharks and flotsam, leading to exit ramp winch rescues, and various members of his party being eaten. 

In short, SHARKNADO had a lot of things going for it the sequel lacks. (full)

July 27, 2015
Subtextual pro-NRA ultra neoconservative Army recruitment tool or no, watching Tara Reid give birth while falling through Earth's atmosphere inside a giant flaming shark, Fin cutting a whole so the parachutes can get through, it's tough to stay mad at America. Reid's skin looks much better, by the way, than in previous episodes. And it's great to see Nova again, especially all militarized like that. I just hope the Syfy/Asylum brain trust wise up and give Nova her own local girl vs. shark series. She's that old animal flesh creeping back again, a thumb in the eye of the CGI Moreau! Second Amendment 4-Eva! (more)
(June 30, 2016)
It used to be just a hodgepodge of dull oceanographers tagging and mapping trans-oceanic migrations, puncture-aided by AIR JAWS, which was three or four great "strikes" of a whale-sized Great White breaching up and clomping down on a stack of seal-shaped tires, over and over, which is bound to be aggravating for the shark, wasting much energy (I always feel bad - were the sharks compensated for their effort? Were substantial fish subsidies paid from the stern?). But the whole week has been getting better every year, with shit aimed so close to me and stoners of a certain age group that it's like Discovery Channel has been reading our dinosaur minds or admiring the numbers on SHARKNADO. Every year there's more cool shit--including endless tie-in advertisements and cross-channel synergy-- aimed so precisely at my demographic that I feel like I'm getting high with all of America. Eli Roth hosts shark talk shows. Andy Samberg does weird trickster post-modern count-downs. SHARK CITY chronicles dishy encounters between a few residents of the local food chain in and around a sunken freighter. Mmy favorite so far: SHARKS OF THE SHADOWLAND and its trio of badass New Zealand government conservationist divers subjecting themselves to the ceaseless group attacks by weird-looking sharks called sevengills, all in the name of battling sea weed plagues!  (more)
(August 15, 2018)
Consider Angie Teodoro Dick as the wild neopagan she-shaman with the spear (above), leader of the rogue New Orleans voodoo style outpost, who deals with the advancing shark issue by a kind of savage STOMP!(TM) performance on the floating docks, drawing the sharks in so she and her warriors can stab them with old-timey whaling harpoons. The warrior's spirited growling and chanting and thumping goes on about three minutes too long, but the bad vibe created by their eventual senseless shark slaughter is interesting in context.. (more)
(August 2, 2019)
For reasons known only to them, Syfy isn't deluging us with their Asylum and Offshoot giant and mutant shark movies this summer. Maybe because they don't have a Deep Blue Sea 3- Blewing Deeper, or an Arctic Sharktadon vs. Lobsterdamus (the visionary lobster who predicts a scalding, buttery armageddon), or Sharknado 7 - Drowning Around. It doesn't matter, as no fan of this genre would remember having seen all their back catalogue, even if they had. And most are still either Syfy 'on demand' or Amazon Prime. So just play catch up and leave it to me to make the notes, together we'll remember everything worth remembering... which is nothing. Isn't it (finally) wonderful?..(cont)

(Sept. 18, 2019)
...if the Jennie the Mermaid element of the film was all done as some kind of Harvey-Walter Mitty style fantasy, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. I would have never watched it. Unless it's Sherlock Jr., I have no interest in movies about the cinematic dream lives of workaday schmucks. Instead, by revealing nothing whatsoever the Depths delivers the full mythic power of an actual dream, the kind spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to. The Bermuda Depths is one of the few films to ever tap fully into the true power of anima projection. The filmmakers know that if there was some big twist at the end, i.e. a mad scientist is behind it all and/or it's a scam (and the scammer would have got away with it if not for those rascally kids), or if the film relied on any rational or even metaphysical 'explanation' for the mysteries, it would be totally lame. But the way it's all filmed, the way the story goes down, it never loses its Jungian "on-the-one" beat, where the film itself is a dream from which there is no waking, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood, for another. (more)
(8-12-2019)

"Furthering the sunglasses and turquoise Florida ecstasy-dilated forward kinetic momentum of Spring Breakers, Korine keeps rolling even though he's too old to party with the club kids. They're exhausting, and so violent, so he's moved into the headspace of a grizzled old stoner, bopping down the Keys, click-clacking the words, and spreading poetry instead of violence. Unless you count poetry as violence, or think the occasional cold cocking of a cripple is somehow immoral. Moondoggie (Matthew McConaughey) doesn't and if Harmony disagrees, he ain't 'breakin." He and the Doggie are sailing with the ocean wind at full speed and damned the too torpedoed to keep up with the headlong momentum of a poetic madman high on an everything that comes his way. Swapping out Breakers' Saint Pete for the party-hearty Key West - a 24/7 raging town where everyone knows and loves the Moondog (no relation to the famous NYC street musician - except perhaps subliminally), the mood is strictly amniotic and delusional. Here's a guy famous--in Florida no less--for being a poet!" (full)

(re; UP FROM THE DEEP): Longtime Corman scriptwriter Charles B. Griffith directs with a nice leisurely (i.e. fairly inept) hand, figuring that if he follows the Jaws chalk marks while sneaking in hipster gags and soaking up the tropical charm (it's shot in the Philippines, but set in Hawaii), he can coast by without barely doing a thing at all. But his camera is so sloppily placed it seems like half the movie is going on in the background while the foreground lingers on a couple of tourist stereotypes shooting the shit (post-synced) at the lobby pamphlet rack. The action picks up once the death toll is so high that greedy hotel manager Forbes can no longer hissy fit it away so he ingeniously offers a cash prize for the monster's head, prompting a run on the Tiki lounge's decorative spears; visiting the gun counter at the local pawn shop. That's when it gets real Mad Magazine: a Japanese salaryman busts out a samurai sword, doing moves out on the rocks while two guys in full frogman suits walk backwards down the hotel stairs, and so on. It would almost come off like a savage satire of American second amendment zeal if it was filmed with a bit more panache. (more)
(7/10)

(on BLUE CRUSH) "The common critical response to the film at the time was that the awesome photography more than made up for the trite story and bland acting, but most (male) critics have a hard time accepting truly free girl character. If you can look past the surface colloquialisms this is practically a Howard Hawks film for young women: overlapping dialogue, strong camaraderie, a  good sense of continuity; issues of courage, maturity and nobility. Best of all, the issue of romance getting in the way of your dreams–yeah you heard me, ladies: romance getting in the way of your dream, instead of romance being your dreams-–is handled with care and ballsy skill."(more)



The Tripping Cabalist - THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT (1965)

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You know a weird old Polish movie is worth hunting down when Jerry Garcia loves it to the point he helped fund its restoration. Even though its black-and-white, made behind the iron curtain, three hours long, even bedecked with the 18th-century powdered wigs and tricornered hats most of us associate more with being bored to a caged frenzy in history class, and even convoluted to the point of bedevilment, The Saragossa Manuscript rocks with elaborately trippy self-reflexive moxy, as if discovering the then-emerging counterculture via a book written on bar napkins by an old Polish general who ended up shooting himself with a silver bullet to avoid becoming a werewolf. The movie centers around the titular book, discovered in a bombed out chateau during the outer framing device; it contains many stories about storytellers whose own stories include flashbacks to other stories being told, until eventually a character may well hear about the events that involved them only a few nights ago, enabling them to finally understand what the other person was shouting at them from behind a rock or something. Confusion will be thy epitaph! 

But if you watch a few times, under the right frame of mind, the frames become clearer; your brain starts to expand as it grasps a new form counter-linear narrative; all roads eventually lead back to the same starting point - under the gallows.

From the first we're put in an unsteady place, following a slightly aimless senior officer during a heated street-to-street battle circa mid-1800s. He distractedly looks through the debris of a ruined house while his army races on without him, only to surge back into control moments later. Within the wreckage doth the officer find a a strange, large book. He is almost taken prisoner by the opposition when the front line retreats back past him in the other direction, but he doesn't even look up from the book; the opposing side officer tries to take him prisoner then becomes obsessed with a big strange book as well; their armies skirmish around them but the transfixed pair wave them away, without looking up, puzzling instead over the strange illustrations and narratives - and one part of the book written by the grandfather (?) of the officer! This pair of opposing officers--their battle forgotten in favor of mutual awe and confusion-- themselves soon may well become images pored over in later eras as well, for the book abides, with no clear single author. 

"Only an uneducated man who sees the same thing every day thinks he understands it"

The outer story main story centers around the one officer's grandfather, a captain of the Spanish Royal Guard, Alfonse van Worden (Zbigniew Cybulski), who takes an ill-advised shortcut through the haunted Sierra Romena mountains on his way to a post in Madrid, much against the advice of his two servants, who bail the moment he falls asleep. At the first woebegone inn he comes to, a pair of sexy Muslim ghost-sorceress sisters invite him to dine in a surreally vast basement. Alight with booze and lusty cheer, his eyes twinkling with the mix of 'can't believe my luck' and 'try not to blow this windfall by saying something stupid' that evokes both Bob Hope in the harem in The Road to Morocco, the girls seduce him with tales of their willingness to share a man in their bed; but his wine must be drugged for no sooner as he taken a draught then Worden wakes up in the blazing light of midday, on a bed of skulls, under a sun-bleached gallows. He can't even remember if he scores with them in the oh-so-important-for-young-male-stud-vanity menage a triois sense. Were they spirits? Where can he find them again and does he want to? 

Well, the Inquisition somehow gets word he's cavorting with Muslim princess and he's soon captured and nailed into a steel devil helmet, only to be rescued by a the Zolta brothers, the hung gypsy bandits he woke up beneath only that afternoon, and their sisters, the two girls from his basement dreams (and after another dinner and slug of--presumably--drugged wine, he wakes up under the same gallows). Is there a direction through the Romenas he can take that doesn't involve being seduced and drugged and waking up under the gallows? Maybe a traveling cabalist can help. From there it gets even weirder; Worden first finds the book at the cabalists' lovely mansion; it's about his own father! A troupe of gypsy troubadours stop by to regale the gathered throng with their interlocking tales of courtship and woe, some of which involves Worden's father, a duel-happy aristocrat who spends most of his life either dying of sword wounds or being healed by water from a lovely wandering Muslim maid who would become Worden's mother (one assumes). 

Things go deep into the strange and yet mundane once we get to the cabalist's castle, which is visited by a flock of gypsy storytellers that night, leading to a melange of tales that Von Worden realizes all tie into him or his father--a duel happy count who, though this tangent isn't explored, marries a possibly Muslim sorceress who rescues him with a timely drink of water while he's suffering from a duel wound. Her sudden appearance out of the distance with a jug atop her head carries an even more mystically other vibe than Alfonse's two otherworldly Muslim princesses. 


Another aspect the interlocked stories share is setting, with time and again the same inns, mountain passes, and city streets coming into play at different times (with the sets aging, crumbling, and becoming young again, as the stories are told). Narrative tentacles touch on everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the tales of gadabout balladeers, loafers, romantic idiots, and drinkers. We hear willingly of Alfonse's father's many duels; we hear of bed-hopping lovers and their drunken go-betweens. We meet inn keepers, pashas, monks, maniacs, merchants, brigands, and occult cabalists. Stories are told by characters inside stories being told to the later teller of a different story explaining the first, to the point Von Worden declares “I’ve lost the feeling of where reality ends, and fantasy takes over.” Sooner or later we find the answer to questions posed by other characters well before the newer tale was begun. In this maze might one character hear, as illustrated dinner table gossip, of exploits they themselves experienced from a different angle only the night before, the mystery of events that went on finally making sense from hearing the other side ("that could drive an experienced person insane!"). In one instance Alfonse is stopped from reading the titular book he finds in the cabalists' library (still unaware he wrote it in the future). "If he read to the end," notes the scorpion-haired cabalist to his buxom servant girl, "the events which are to follow will make no sense." You know it's all tripped out When the titular book one is discussing has already been partially written and sitting in the background of a scene it has not quite begun to depict.  


As a result of this and its non-linearity, the film takes several viewings to fully unravel. God knows how incoherent it must have been when Jerry saw it, though there certainly are stretches that, in my opinion, don't do much to help the overall narrative. Actually, depending on what was cut out, the version Jerry saw may have made more sense than this whole three hour affair. Honestly, it can be trying for first time viewers, especially after the more-or-less recognizable amorous maybe-ghost story, in the vein of A Chinese Ghost Story and Ugetsu of the first part gives way to a tangled amor-fou roundelay amidst the mercantile class, bringing to life images from saucy 17th-century European woodcuts and classical Spanish art while looping back around on its own intermediary-dependent 'storyteller telling stories about storytellers telling stories' loopy chain. The crazed synth score underwriting the ghostly seduction scene gives way to fruitful classical and the money begins to flow, to the point a banker ruins his fortune by suing an investor for not taking back his doubled investment. The son the banker sends into the world to return the money will have no interest in any of it, preferring to read romance novels and become a love-afflicted dilettante. Meanwhile ghosts and duelists, and survivors of duels relate the stories of the parents of the man they killed in a duel, or fatally wounded in a duel, and all in the same town or road. The work of Bunuel, Cervantes, Swift, Pierre Louÿs, Huysmans, and one's owns story's meaning goes into another's so that a man's penance is cut short when his go-between realizes one of his busqueros got the wrong window. Then there's the odious Count Pena Flor, a made-up character invented by the wandering-eyed gorgeous young wife to make her aging nobleman husband jealous, to the point he pays a handsome layabout to find and kill him; only for his young wife to later pretend to be "Pena Flor's" vengeful ghost to scare him into taking a long pilgrimage so she can get it on unimpeded... with the same handsome layabout! Genius, thy name is Potocki! Elsewhere, a wise old hermit monk tricks a giant into herding and milking his goats in exchange for exorcising him of evil spirits. 

 Some parts occasionally get bogged down in the crowd shots, with characters wandering from one set to another. But stick with it and what seems to be a voice from God, booming out in answer to questions about life after death asked during a crackling thunderstorm in one person's woeful tale turns out to be the voice of someone who misunderstood the question in another. Eventually things become an ever shifting dream; so that a traveler might find objects he left behind from the night before at places he just arrived at. 

Thanks to a uniquely Eastern European sense or deadpan absurdity, these sunny Spanish tales-within-tales avoid the stuffy bourgeois airlessness that often accompanies 'respectable' film adaptations of revered satiric classics (i.e. the urge to cake the actors in so many wigs and costumes they can barely move or speak, or worse, move too close to the other end of the class spectrum, and cake them in grubby peasant realness). On The Saragossa Manuscript, we may notice the similarity between a shot in a tavern and a painting we recently saw at the Met, but what of it?- there's no big art highlight marker traces; no one is aiming for accolades - this is art skittering under the radar. Every scene is wild with rocky patterns into which one might hallucinate things into existence without the party censors even knowing they were there. Stories all take place at the same locations over time; the action regularly doubles back around to the same sets and rocky exteriors, passageways between rocky formations, such as the one below - framed by a Satanic-looking standing cattle skeleton, horns intact, the yoke still around its bony shoulders; in the middle ground, a cow or maybe mammoth rack of rib fossil indenting the rock at left; at right foreground , the splintered remains of a boat hull, or fallen roof? is it a giant loom, or a piano interior harp? Note the nearly transparent ghostly pitcher in the left foreground. Is it there or not there? In one shot, we see a discarded sketchbook in the lower foreground, their lines seeming to etch their way off the page and into the nearby half-ruined gallows (that's a different morning than the below, which has no sketchbook, but keep your eyes open to every corner). This use of cinematic space that is neither interior nor exterior but a place that refuses to be either in-or-outdoors, with walls dripping with trippy mold patterns, evokes Tarkovsky.


In the version Jerry Garcia had only seen in some Haight-Ashbury theater, the film ran only two hours; nearly an hour had been chopped out by American distributors trying to get i more focused on the supernatural menage-a-trois; a full three-hour version was hard to locate. Did it even exist? Garcia hooked up with fellow fans Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola to find (behind the iron curtain), restore and subtitle all the missing elements. Then, as if to punish him for his band's devil-may-care name, Jerry died before he could see the finished final three-hour cut. 

It's an irony that befits the irony-crammed film and writer Count Jan Potocki's original manuscript. The more widely read version, published in 1805, was shorter and more focused on a linear, lighthearted supernatural lighthearted version; the longer complete one, with more digressions and dead ends, which--tell me this doesn't sound ironically familiar--was published in its entirety only after Potocki's death (by silver bullet suicide to avoid the lycanthropic curse - for serious!). In other words, neither Jerry nor Potocki ever got to see the full three-hour version.  These coincidences are important to ponder in the meta framework which this frame story inevitably encourages us to incorporate. And if, at end of this massive tome, we're left with only the vaguest sense of narrative completion, with no real climax of denouement (unless you count a vague nod to the final shot of Von Sternberg's Morocco), and with certain last minute confessions seeming almost like a 'last call' hack-twist rather than a legitimate and satisfying wrap-up, well.... you can always try watching it again, real soon. Chances are, it won't even be the same movie. I've seen it three times now and the interwoven strands still lead me into knots, just trying to explain or write them down makes me dizzy in the best possible way. 

My TUBI Cue (Deadly Women Edition): 10 Weird Vintage Gems for the High and Inside

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Unlimited constant availability makes choosing movies daunting. Now Tubi! With so may platforms and titles stretching into infinity, one can feel eternally stranded at some giant video store, paralyzed by indecision, while mom waits ever more frustrated in the car (a recurring dream I have). But Tubi! At least in the days of the video store you could narrow it down to 2-3 choices, so when you got home your selection was much narrower. Nowadays you take home not only the video store in its entirety, nothing title is ever unavailable / already rented out. How can you pick and stick with just one? 

TUBI here! Relax. Tubi come.

I've recently fallen in love with old Tubi. It's a free streaming service with (a manageable amount of) commercials and has eclipsed Amazon Prime in stocking all the super-weird / cool shizz from the golden age (i.e. pre-CGI). Amazon still has a lot, but they tend to disappear and/or suddenly cost $ to rent. Everything on Tubi is free, including the Charles Band catalogue, so no unpleasant surprises. Not only is all the weirdest, wildest stuff here, but the occasional spate of commercials bring a lot of nostalgic and strange value if you were a child in the pre-cable / VCR era. Commercials provide breathing and bathroom space, and since the titles aren't censored there's a lot of great ironic counterpoint to, say, having a bloody vivisection interrupted by an ad for Geico's new bundling service. Some of these babies have never had a commercial break in their lives, and it gives them a kind of subliminal network respectability. The only drawback is, unlike on Youtube, there's no way to get it to automatically play the next title in your list once what you're watching ends. Instead Tubi picks some random, less weird title and shoves it down your throat the minute the credits stop. I have no intention of watching Shrek Forever After when I'm done with Blood and Black Lace (I'd want Baron Blood) or Are we There Yet? after Shivers (instead of The Crazies) but there you are.

PS - In book news, I've been digging the new Bleeding Skull!: A 1990s Trash-Horror Odyssey, in glorious glossy color (finally), with reds that bleed all over your Polonia tube socks. If, like me. you only heard of a handful of the titles mentioned in BS, then you too might start looking for the ones they wax gushingly on about. Then welcome to TUBI! You can immediately stop watching with ease. Five minutes into a Polonia, Todd Sheets or J.R. Bookwalter movie is all I've ever gotten. Though I did manage to finish all of La Polonia's hilarious Black Magic, I couldn't get more than a few minutes into Feeders. Turns out a lot of things those guys--Thrower, Choi, Ziemba--love are really an acquired taste. You probably had to be a young child in the slasher-80s so didn't know any better and imprinted on VHS slashers the way my generation imprinted on UHF TV classic horror double features. Luckily there is a big swath where our tastes doth meet: I love Frozen Scream, Frostbiter: Wrath of the Wendigo, Winterbeast, (ooh, a pattern!).

PPS - Needing a theme, this list ties in also with my ongoing Dangerous Womencollection, a round-up of women who kill without getting all whiny about it. The women who can just kill and kick ass and not let it bug them, the women who can kill with a smile --these deadly woman are the incarnations of Kali, the patron goddess of Acidemic! In the words of "Old Toad Face" in Gunga Din, Kali! Kali! KALI!

Anastasia Woolverton as Connie Sproutz
1. DISEMBODIED
(1998) Dir. William Kursten
***

If the tough "gamin" from Dementia kept her brains in a jar in an Eraserhead-style steam heated room, wandered around the desolate nighttime cityscape killing people with her grotesque facial mutation ala From Beyond  and tinkered around with strange animated objects and post-industrial fixtures, well, you'd have one weird-ass flick. You'd have Disembodied, the artsy feature debut from experimental filmmaker William Kursten (!)

It's a weird homage and surrealist abstraction, part post-industrial sci-fi, part grungy punk urban decay, mostly occurring in a fleabag hotel room that seems ever ready to devolve into Tarkovsky x Lynch fecund indoor/outdoor moldy wilderness. Connie Sproutz (Anastasia Woolverton) doesn't fit any one mold; what is her deal? She can dance around in garish summer dress; give herself a coffee buzz by pouring a whole pot into the brain vat; organize her bouncing rocks; dream of cool claymation Yves Tanguy-esque space anemones; spy on her cute redhead freelance hustler neighbor (Hanna Nease) through a hole in the wall; avoid the skeevy hotel clerk who keeps asking her over to watch his old 16mm reels of industrial stock footage; and then--when even the night owls are asleep--she hits the town, rarin' to dissolve any lone passers-by with jetting puss from her facial tumor so she may consume the gooey remains (ala Troll 2)Dashes of Repo Man, Brain Damage, and Liquid Sky pepper the events to come as her old employer at a research lab comes gunning for her and her hyper-intelligent alien facial tumor. I think. It doesn't pay if you try too hard to figure out what's going on; surrendering to the high concept weirdness may give you that out-of-body experience. Resisting might give you a headache, existential nausea, and/or skeeved-out.

It's worth the ride, though. Recently restored and remastered, Disembodied looks gorgeously wretched in a glowing matte palette of mossy greens and browns. If Eraserhead were colorized it would look a bit like this (I hope). The occasional dreams of strange alien worlds glisten with all the bright purples missing from Connie's day-to-day world, creating a sense of eventual unification. In heaven, everything will be fine once again. 

For her Bleeding Skull 90s Odyssey review, Ann Choi instantly likens the film to the sort of acid trip one endures rather than enjoys: "you need a certain kind of mental constitution to handle hallucinogens --an ability to understand that reality will be on hiatus for the next 12 hours and maybe you'll see the Grim Reaper, but it also might just be a bathrobe" (p. 85) Hey man, I've been there way too many times, which is why I can't imagine returning to Disembodied for any further nutrients, though I do recommend it. As Choi says "it's best to accept it all without questions and escape into a trance, one where you're rarely bored even when you literally see a goth girl fall asleep in a chair." (86) In case you can't tell, she loved it. I wouldn't go that far myself, but if you're 'experienced' then just know: it's our kind of movie.

Adrian Barett as "the Gamin"
2. DEMENTIA
(1955) Dir John Parker
****

One of the likely inspirations for Kursten's Disembodied, the surrealist paranoid night fancy of and high flyin' Bunuel meets Ed Wood-sy psycho-beatnik weirdness is a must see, and now thanks to a great HD print on Tubi it looks amazing. Long forgotten after it fell afoul of censors, Dementia floated in the abyss of the shelf until it acquired an Ed McMahon narration and was released as Daughter of Horror, where it became enshrined as the movie playing when the original The Blob attacks the local theater having an all-night horror festival (for which it is perfectly suited.)

This version, the original, contains no narration, nor even a word of dialogue (only the occasional mocking laughter or hysterical sobbing). It doesn't need it. The wolfish and demented grins of the men, the haughty scorn and weary loathing in the eyes of the women, speak way more clearly than words. We open (and close) in the fleabag motel room of a tough-looking beatnik chick (Adrienne Barett) billed as 'the Gamin' who wakes up from a day of strange tidal wave nightmares, gets dressed (black turtleneck, sports coat and big round medallion- my uniform as an 80s punk), tests out the spring on her switchblade and begins her midnight creep  through a desolate nighttime nightmare Venice Beach, CA. 

She stares at a neglected child sitting in her hotel's rickety stairwell; she laughs at a drunk being sapped by a sadistic cop on the street; little person and real life news hawker Angelo Rossitto gleefully shows her the nightly edition: "Mysterious Stabbing" (she laughs rather than winces); a smirking pimp sells her to a rich fat guy in a limo (Bruno Ve Sota!), en route to his club, she dreams of a masked figure who leads who her through a graveyard where her dead parents are boozing it up and slapping each other around on their living room furnishings. She stabs the father after he kills her mother; she's followed by a detective who laughs at her confusion he looks just like her murdered father! A demented looking flower girl's basket hides a severed hand! It's clutching her medallion! The people who watch as she cuts it off Bruno Ve Sota have no faces. ARGGHH!

All the while, George Antheil's weird horn-heavy score steadily amps up the noir tension. The wordless eerie whooping of Marni Nixon's vocalizing gets progressively unhinged. Paranoia is pushed past the point of endurance or even conceivable reality and even into the realm of Bunuelian black comedy. She finds the pimp hustling in a jazz club and he saves the day by giving her a drink and a cigarette. Booze and nicotine cure her! She literally throws on a cocktail dress and gets onstage to sing with Shorty Rogers and his Giants. At the tables, sleazy dudes grope drunken party girls and lonely old guys with five-o-clock shadow drink up. Everyone starts laughing at our onstage gamin, pointing their fingers, once the detective shows up. A cop shoves dead Ve Sota's head through the window bars, so he can dig the swinging Shorty sounds. After awhile, even the Gamin laughs between her screams. Bunuel fans will remember the climax of El as Ed Wood fans will remember the devil dream blackboard sequence in Glen or Glenda (which is on Tubi, colorized). If Glen's crazy finger-pointing snips and snails dream was extended to a full hour, given a whooping Marni Nixon soundtrack, and turned loose on the empty nocturnal boulevards of Hollywood, USA, Dementia would result.

Watching it now you may wonder about why it could ever have run afoul of censors. There's no nudity or onscreen violence. In a way I guess it's nudity of the soul that scared them-- to watch Dementia is to see the dark seething Freudian unconscious of America's urban spaces suddenly erupting out of every sewer at once, covering recognizable plotting of an average film noir with a flood of paranoid Maya Deren-esque experimentalism that easily could have warped 1955 reality so thoroughly it would never re-straighten. Those censors wanted their unconscious out of sight, their noir conventions used in the service of a romantic plot, they wanted a mixer with their whiskey. This is the straight up shizz, no frillying around with conventional plot trimmings, just a switch blade straight through the eyeball into the part of the brain where your dreams go to die. 

Either way, censors, you lost! 65 years later and reality is now officially bent beyond recognition! G'head, Gamin! Carve your way to jazz freedom! Over and over and over....

Other Recommended Tubi Viewing:Glen or Glenda, Cat Women of the Moon, Mesa of Lost Women

Joanna Arnold as June
3. GIRL GANG
(1954) Dir. Robert C. Bertano
***

There are so many boring 50s girl gang movies from the mid-50s a hep cat may want to just shut the door on the whole sub-genre:there's always some clean cut teen girl whose parents are either too drunk or too busy  to spend time with their daughter, so she's led down the wrong path; meanwhile the local chief of police lectures absentee parents about responsibility and talks with his officers about the youth problem in dry and lengthy paternal monologues. The girl gang itself is as dangerous as Potsy at a sock hop and so clueless about the life they depic (i.e. getting so hooked on reefers you go into the shakes without your 'maryjanes') it's pathetic. Finally, one of the gang shoots and kills a gas station attendant or a security guard and the "fun" is over. Sadly, even Ed Wood's The Violent Years (also on Tubi) falls into this well-worn rut. Parents, this film is a message for you! Will your child fall victim, or will you reach out to them now? (i.e. today's absentee parents' solution: search their kid's sock drawers and call the Family School to take them away if you find anything other than socks). 

Well, listen here: forget everything you ever saw or heard about those other 50s girl gangs and come join this one! Girl Gang has everything you want. And it rocks. There ain't a parent in sight. No cop even has a speaking role until the last scene. It's the movie your mother warned you about. And if you mom tries to ship you off to rehab because she finds a stashed joint, you know what to do. Afterwards, we'll help you stash the evidence and max her credit cards. 

Timothy Farrell (the psychiatrist who narrates most of Glen or Glenda) is the main adult male character with the most lines. He's Joe, the Fagin to an ever-expanding rolodex of teenage junkies turned from normal kids into addicts paying him for their hits via prostitution, blackmail, and robbery. Most of the film is set in two rooms of his walk-up apartment. We get extended scenes of his day-to-day drug pushing, alternating between the kitchen--where people shoot up and discuss business--and the living room where the new kids puff their maryjanes, make out, and fall asleep. It's the exploitation equivalent to those Warren Williams Warner Brothers pre-code big business satires, where we watch him seduce his secretary, fire her boyfriend, pay off a chiseling ex-wife, and instruct a high-end prostitute how to entrap his rival, all while still in his pajamas over the course of a real time twenty minutes, in a single scene. Farrell wears a tie and is sleazier, and his 'ex' could care less if he's making out with the new talent, long as she gets hers. 

For those 'in the know' the feeling of deja vu should be strong: this movie will evoke the vibe of hanging around your dealer's apartment, watching him do deals (You got 'em comin' and goin'" says one of his car theft ring potheads, almost admiringly -- wising up to the traps she finds herself in doesn't mean she's able to escape it). We see him help one of his ace procurers tie off a mainliner in this kitchen (the boy's reward for bringing new kids over,) making out with the kid's willing girlfriend June (Joann Arnold) before showing her how to do a "joy pop"; setting the new kids up with reefer cigarettes (one each, and one to take home "on the house") which everyone smokes fiendishly before making out or dancing or falling asleep in his living room. Like any good dealer, Joe's apartment is also his place is his business --the kitchen even has a pay phone. Nothing is free. It seems like you're chilling after school at some hip older guy's pad, but really you're becoming indoctrinated and indebted. He keeps track of every hit. He also keeps a drunken doctor ("I'm... competent") on call, to show kids how to go the hypodermic route ("I don't feel like breakin' a kid in on a habit,") and --though we never see it--probably saving their lives if they OD. Most girl gang movies would have maybe a two minute scene of this stuff, then right back to the police station and the broken home for more tired soap opera and censor-pleasing polemics. Girl Gang wouldn't be caught dead in either. 

June realizing she'll soon be free of all the Jim-Jims in this town

As a former addict, I really related. The weed stuff isn't quite believable (the kids smoke what look like cigarettes so savagely they seem to be suffering from nicotine poisoning rather than highness) but the heroin stuff seems pretty legit and I appreciate the level of close-up detail we get watching Joe patiently explain how to cook the dope with a spoon and a match, drawing the liquid into the hypo, and the difference between mainlining (right into a tied-off arm vein for a very intense--"feel just like Jesus' son' but much shorter kind of high) and a "joy pop" (just under the skin, absorbed more slowly for a less intense high but one that lasts much longer and with a more gentle come-down). I can't think of any other gang movie that even comes close to this level of detail about all the aspects of being a drug user and a drug pusher, all made concrete and strangely natural thanks Farrell's weird nasal but deeply paternal voice. He gives us the step-by-step shooting up guide with the same natural authority that made him convincing as a psychiatrist talking about cross-dressing in Glen or Glenda. It's almost like a how-to video you'd see in health class. Casting him as a dealer makes the dealing seem like a legit occupation in a nicely disturbing way. Most drug dens in these movies are hilariously over the top, but these 'day in the life' extended scenes are never boring as the focus is all on sex action, drugs and crime. One of the things the girls get up to is a special sorority they have where in order to be initiated you have to get your virgin card punched five times by random guys. They all meet down at a school gym where they smoke reefers, bop around to a boogie-woogie pianist, and the girls grab the guys for seven minutes of whatever in the back room. You almost feel sorry for the poor guys, being treated like objects. "Not again," one of them pleads. 

That brings us to the real scene stealer of the film: the lovely and very capable Joanna Arnold as June. Initially brought over as the girlfriend of Farrell's chief operator/procurer (and the guy who likes to mainline, so he always needs money) she becomes a very cool regular by the end of the scene, seducing Joe and earning a full demo of shooting up (she's ready to graduate from reefers). Some of the girls in the cast are pretty amateur, but Arnold is as to the exploitation manner borne. Moving effortlessly from newbie to weed addict (!) to entrapping her nervous real estate manager boss, getting him to fork over big bucks for sex to pay for her heroin habit, all within the course of the film's short running time. she seems to love every aspect of 'the life.' You can feel sorry for some of these enslaved kids but it's clear from frame one June is meant to be a master not a slave; she's like Bella Swann becoming one of the vampires. Once she enters fully the life of procurement (bringing around new teenage customers looking for thrills in order to score free hits) she all but sprouts bat wings and soars. Look at her in the shot at top, eating an apple and showing off her gams while her boss fishes $50 out of the safe, with all the authority and sexy confidence of someone who truly loves her work as an exploiter of male desire and a teenager's false sense of invincibility. She was Playmate of the Month, May 1954! That figures. Figures too that Girl Gang was her only starring role (Imdb has most everything else she did as 'uncredited'). Joanne, you're too good for 'em! 

Rosie Perez as...
4. PERDITA DURANGO
(1997) Dir. Alex de la Iglesia 
*** 1/2

By all rights Alex de la Iglesia should be a cult name like Tarantino or Jodorowsky. For those of us who were introduced to him via Dance with the Devil back in the late-90s (Perdita's idiotic US release title) it was like finding a secret vein of Tarantino x Jodorowsky Mexiamericano gold. No one else seemed to know about it. It was a secret thing. He's had bad luck breaking through in the US, but it hasn't stopped him, witness his recent HBO series 30 Coins. Anyway, Rosie Perez is Perdita, a wandering capitalist hustler bringing her sister's ashes back to Mexico (or vice versa). Along the way she bumps into Romeo, a totally infectious lunatic played with great zeal and sexual warmth by Javier Bardem. Her whole life finally finds its groove. The movie takes off and never looks back.

Back in 1997, most of us in the US had no idea who Bardem was, but we fell in love with him as Romeo. He's since gone on to become an icon but we saw him first!  Playing a kind con man / witch doctor, he's got charms galore and makes his money by holding Santeria ceremonies on his compound with his partner (Screamin' Jay Hawkins!!) and dug up corpses. After a tense van ride across the border, Romeo has one of his exhumed corpses in the back of the van) Perdita sets up shop with him and together they come up with mad sick impromptu dares, like kidnapping a pair of doe-eyed American tourist teenager couple (the girl is Heather Graham's sister Aimee) for a human sacrifice, bringing them along at gunpoint as they flee the federales and try deliver a truckload of human fetuses to an illegal rejuvenating make-up company south of the border. Yes! Road trip, as these two naive white kids get an unrestrained glimpse into the wild edge-of-seat desperado life, Perdita's mothering instinct may kick in or they may just get sacrificed to get them out of the way. Meanwhile, they play a tape that Romeo loves, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. Watching them bump and sway, delighted, to Herb's indelible but pasteurized rhtythm while the traumatized kids in the back seat look on, really cinema gets no better. Add Screamin' Jay Hawkins to the mix, rattling his skull cane and doing the voodoo shakes, I mean, you don't even need James Gandolfini as a bruised FBI agent trailing Romeo and winding up hospitalized repeatedly due to accidents no doubt indirectly caused by encantos de Romeo's abuela.


If you're a Lynchian you of course recognize Perdita as a character from Wild at Heart, (Isabella Rossellini in an unconvincing blonde wig). Here, while Perdita is the one we follow, Bardem's charismatic Romeo steals the film and we feel the pain of his absence when he's not around. It's to Perez' credit she lets him run with it. We love him through her eyes; she's more than able to match his intensity and let us feel her love for him as well as her concern, as the limits of her own bloodthirsty psychopathy are eventually tested against his limitless homicidal momentum. She's not used to someone who's able to match her crazy for crazy and then keep going. 

SIDE PRAYER:  

I pray for Alex di la Iglesia to break through in los Estados Unidos. He seems to have been cursed by a witch who tells his parent companies to pick the absolute most stupid English titles they can think of, like Dance with the Devil (Perdita's original dump-to-video title) Witching and Bitching (when Bitches' Sabbath was right there); 30 Coins (means nothing to anyone not overly well-versed on the New Testament), The Last Circus, which means absolutely nothing, - and so on. The result, he's the best kept secret awaiting any fan of weird darker-than-black comedies who don't mind reading subtitles and looking past dumb US titles that are either misleading, vague, bland or corny. Alex, next time drop me a line, I'll help you find a catchy title and finally break the curse!

See also Di Iglesia's: Day of the Beast and The Last Circus - also on Tubi!

Sabrina Siani as Okron
5. CONQUEST
(1983) Dir. Lucio Fulci
** / * / Woodian Rating - ***1/2

It's bow vs. boa in this severely cracked and cloudy gem from Italy's early-80s sword and sorcery family. In a world that is still, apparently, cooling down from its volcanic conception (the air is opaque throughout, as if the whole outdoors was one vast steam bath), a young archer named Iliad (Andrea Occhipinti), travels across the waters to a new land, where his presence soon spooks the druggy dreams of brain-eating lady sorceress Ocron (Sabrina Siani). Naked but for a metal mask and a slithering boa constrictor (that 1981 Nastassja Kinski photo was still 'in') she sends wave after wave of her wolf-and-ape-headed minions out into the fog to bring her back the tasty brain-filled head and magic bow of plucky Iliad, but he gets help too from wandering hunk named Mace (Jorge Rivero), who is loved by all animals. Hawks warn Mace of approaching monsters; dolphins bite off his bonds when he's crucified at the bottom of the sea, etc. Naturally they decide to travel together...  Iliad will teach of the magic bow; Mace will teach Iliad the tricks of this new land, and the monsters shall come at them fast and furious. And always... always... in a cloud of murky fog. What could go wrong?

The best scenes of course are the weird druggy brain-eating rites performed deep and out of focus in Ocron's cavern. She does a lot of gyrating on her fur-covered stone bed with her snake, dreaming of Iliad without. a face. At one point her wolfheaded underlings pass around a weird combination coke straw/toothpick/joint from nostril to nostril. We never learn what is in the straw, but the passing the straw vibe evokes the extended drug orgy scenes in Abel Ferrara movies! Way to get high, dream of faceless archer boys, and eat brains, Ocron! 

Despite her alienating (and rather overtly misogynist) metal mask, we come to kind of root for this evil brain-eating sorceress named Ocron and her grunting supplicants. Pulling off limbs and heads of their 'conquests' (!) and falling into druggy reveries, they are way cooler than Iliad and his boyfriend who can't seem to open up about their burgeoning feelings. Yes, like so many of these films, human women don't have much of a presence or if they do it's as sex objects and/or victims or in one sad case, both. A groovy homoerotic subtext could compensate--hunky Mace who knows what rivers are best left uncrossed; and he and Iliad come to each others' rescue really socking it to roving bands of the sorceress's killers--yet, they are too repressed to suck venom out of each other's leg wounds the way, say, Xena and Gabrielle would just a decade later. 

Yes we've come a long way since 1983. In today's more enlightened times, the  misogynistic choice of making the most powerful woman in the film a monster who is both naked and faceless would raise such a righteous Twitterstorm the film would probably be pulled from release. Add the uptight toxic homophobia that won't let one man suck the venom out opf another man's ankle and it would be buried forever ala Song of the South or The Day the Clown Cried.  But don't worry, these are just two of the many dumb ideas in the fogbound Conquest. 

Luckily we're not expecting a good film. No one but me seems to like Conquest. It's been released only because Fulci has such a fervent following. But I went into it knowing how bad it was supposed suck (even Fulci disowned it, walking away before it was released). 

Prepared, with rock bottom expectations, I loved it.

The passing of the straw

As most of the mise-en-scene unspools behind that crazy white misty fog, it's important the soundtrack pick up the slack, and man does it ever. Moody, celestial, yet mired in the murk of its era, Goblin's Claudio Simonetti gives us a lake-dragging mellotron, glistening synth beds and a medley of distant animal grunts, names chanted in druggy ecstasy, howls, and distant hollers, a lot of which is picked up only if you listen in on good headphones. With some passages seeming to reference everyone from Vangelis to Barry DeVorzon, the score leavens things out with a truly otherworldly embryonic warm sludginess that makes what could have been a wearying slog through an outdoor steam room into something like trash poetry, especially if you watch it through half-asleep eyes, with headphones on, and glasses off so you can't tell if it's the onscreen fog or your own rheumy eyes making the blur.

I'm not joking about that fog, though. I hear a lot of the kids who rented this back in the day thought the tape was defective. Fulci used mist/fog to a great effect in his earlier films (The Beyond, City of the Living Dead - both on Tubi!) so what went wrong this time? Was it the weather? Lack of a wind machine? 

Regardless, I dig dozing off to this film in the later afternoon with the sun in my eyes after work or on a weekend and I've done so five times since only this past summer. There's nothing to keep me awake or bum me out in Conquest... as long as I don't look too close; I don't want to look over and see some close-up of an oozing pus wound. In fact I don't want to look too close at anything in Conquest. But listening to it is all right: there are no jarring screams (realistic screams would be disturbing but there's a stilted tint to the screams here that make them more like some kind of ritualized breathwork) or cursing, and so little dialogue that when someone speaks it carries weird charge as if words have only recently begun to form amidst the growls, honks and ostentatious breathing. Ocron's voice sounds far away though she is right next to the camera: "only Zora can help me find the wanderer!" she says between boa constrictor-grinding orgasms. Suddenly a panting white dog is right by her side (Zora, I presume?). Were I fully awake I might go WTF where'd that dog come from, but half-asleep I know where it came from; the foggy zone between consciousness and dreams--where the mind fills in every blank foggy white space with anthropomorphic shapes. Look up at the rolling clouds while half-asleep and you'll see Zoras in every twirling puff. Is the smoky cloudiness of Ocron's lair any different? As with all the films on this list, the occasional breaks for ads on Tubi actually help the experience. Conquest is a fail but it still better than a lot of successes: some of Simonetti's music is recycled wholesale from other films, but it's great stuff and brings big moody sense of grandeur and loss when Mace and Iliad finally, tearfully, part (Mace touches his magic bow, but won't accept it - it's power is still too dangerous in his (less-evolved) land. When the sight of a woman torn in half is interrupted for the comforting sight of a sloshed threesome on the couch ordering from booze-delivering service Drizzly.. (oh Drizzly, where were you when I needed you?) - then bouncing back to the severed head, all is right with the world. 

That's the key - that's when it all comes together in some divine Woodsian masterpiece. The platform, advertising + half-asleep eyes + pareidolia fog + primordial synths +  web people emerging from their cliffside crevice, looking like Pillsbury snowmen and talking like Herve Villechaize ("where is your friend?" he asks Mace, who says "I have no friends." aww shouts Herve "you lie!" These guys want the bow that glows blue and shoots dozens of arrows at once for themselves. Will Iliad turn his widdle waft awound and go back to save Mace? Just dig the weird sand-blown rocks and dunes and the way the webbed snow boys blend in with the sand dunes. Or the way Iliad comes back and shouts up at his crucified friend "I'm not afraid!" before firing his magic multiple laser bow which insrtantly kills everyone he wants alkl at once and even turns corners. So brave of him to not even need to get out of the boat to wipe out the entire race of sand boys. Hahh but it takes able dolphins able to resceue Mace after he's thrown, still ccrucified, over the cliff and winds up on the bottom of the ocean. 

The dolphins, the sand webbed Herve, Simonetti doing his thing, Ocron with her snake and dog, the various marauding monster men, the fog,  the manly man and the young boy with the nifty bow, traps and nets and feeling of friendship, the sudden surprise beheading, the way Iliad goes "yayayayayayaya" when batting away at the bat. The presence of bats flying in hair is a Fulci trademark as his yen for gross out close-ups of Iliad's venom and pus-engorged dart wound. Make sure to get all the ants crawling around on the yellow, venomous pus, Lucio! That's like your signature. He also adds lots of weird angles to artsy the film up: the camera is seldom at eye level. Usually, it is kept low so the boys loom as giants with the magic hour sun behind their heads, or it swoops high up on a crane, as if some friendly giant beaming down at their foggy folly. If you need an aesthetic reason, honey you're in the wrong place. He does it to keep it interesting, because he's Italian and even bad Italian films are interesting. We can barely even see what's going on through all the fog. Did they get water on the inside of the lens, is that what happened? And they didn't realize it because it at the time, so they pretended they meant it that way, and that the land was enshrouded in fog in those pre-Ice Age times?  It's cool - I'm not giving Conquest my full attention either, that's why it's such a gem. Fulci Forever! 

'Further Recommended Viewing on Tubi:Deathstalker, Sorceress, Ator, the Fighting Eagle

Fay Spain as Queen Antinea of Atlantis
6. HERCULES CONQUERS ATLANTIS
(1961) Dir. Vittorio Cottafavi
***

Considered one of the better peplum out there, this big budget easy-going but occasionally disheartening epic has some impressive sets, outrageous events, and Reg Park as the mighty Hercules. Most peplum on streaming services are dodgy full-frame solid print (though the recently released Film Detective" HD Blu-ray using the alternate title, Hercules and the Captive Women is even better, with a great peplum documentary attached.) Both titles are correct, as Hercules trashes Atlantis and rescues a captive girl from a shape-changing monster (left). Fay Spain plays the wicked Queen of Atlantis. She's also the captive girl's mother and the one who ordered her to be the sacrifice! The prophets say the girl must die or Atlantis shall crumble into the sea! Yikes. Talk about evil mothers. She sends her daughter out to die again while trying to mate with and/or drug the mighty Hercules. Failed on both counts, Queen! 

One drawback is too much of Herc's family life at the start which leaves us feeling kind of Ulysses-style guilty while he's off fighting and rescuing. Usually I can't wait for our hero to escape home obligations and start the quest, but this time we're kind of rooting for him to stay home. It seems like his poor wife and family can't get him for a moment, and he clearly doesn't want to go either, his 'friend' has to drug him and basically shanghai him. It's pretty comical to think of Thebes as so full of cowards and duty-shirkers that the king can get only convicts and shanghaied demigods to save their country from vague prophesies. Either way then you have Herc's son stowing away too and oh man. Luckily the son is a capable adult, despite his anachronistic pompadour. 


I love this movie, for the most part, but it has very cold and painful stretches involving family life. Herc's family seems like an impossible ideal one can never get fully back to, while the evil queen's family life is a gruesome trap where the old eat the young. In each case, the youth fear the wrath of their parents: Herc's son stows away in the cargo area of the ship to avoid his dad's wrath (he forbade him coming); the cold, loveless reception the queen grants her own heartbroken daughter isn't the kind of camp fun we get in something like (in my mind the best of the lot),  Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World (1961). Things are a bit off in this one, which makes it unique but not a favorite. For one thing, there's the obligatory sexy dance of the maidens - but the camera follows not the comely maidens but the shape-changing lead male! What? Seems like a real opportunity missed for the straight males in the audience to finally be able to ogle some non-beefcake. We don't get it. The princess is too young to ogle, just barely, and the queen is too evil. We got nothing. Where is the gorgeous Sylva Koscina when you need her?  

Luckily, Reg Park's deadpan comedic brilliance saves the day. Once Herc knows who his enemies are, and commences his mighty column toppling, all is well. I like Park's interpretation of Hercules best, as you get the feeling he isn't afraid of anything and doesn't give much of a shit, and that's in a nutshell why I prefer his version to Steve Reeves. Blasphemy, you say? Hey, man, Reeves is great too, but is much more into posturing, ever alert to his own mythic nobility; he's always trying to imitate a statue. Park's Herc on the other hand is a little lazier and fun to be around. Rather than pose and flex all day, he'll seize any chance to drink and eat and laugh even at himself, albeit in a very deadpan, cool (non-slapsticky) kind of way. If you watch carefully you can see one of his disbelieving Jim/Hardy-style cheats to camera before the scene cross-fades.

With a pretty big budget for massive sets and extras there's a lot to see and do here: cloned hood-eyed super soldiers; gas chambers; a shape-shifting monster; narrow escapes that rely on the level of strength not granted mortal men; Uranus as a meteoric rock ready to rain blood upon the Grecians; iron bar bending; multiple counts of attempted filicide; a floor that slides open to reveal an acid bath ala House on Haunted Hill; a girl half swallowed up in stone; volcano footage from other films and shot specifically for this one, including--and this is pretty daring since Hercules causes the eruption--a woman and her child slain in a lava deluge; a very impressive and well-lit giant cave set for Herc to climb impressively upon, and a great deep red reception hall with all sorts of shady black pagan god statues.  For those new to the Italian 'peplum' tradition, or those who may be eternally turned off after trying to watch badly cropped, dubbed and faded prints on TV back in the day, there's never been a better time to get your feet wet. If you're looking for the gateway drug, the way Sergio Leone's "Man with no Name" trilogy is the gateway of Italian westerns, then start with Hercules in the Haunted World, (1961) then go for this one. After that, try to find a good source for the un-as-yet restored Hercules (1958) and Hercules Unchained (1959) and --though this one is super rare even in an unrestored letterboxed version -- Goliath and the Vampires (this last one was supposed to come out as a blu-ray but the company that announced it pulled it due to Covid, Please sirs, resume thy labors!)

Fans of Mario Bava will drool imagining the painterly beauty of shots like this one --from his work on HERCULES (on Tubi) --restored to its former gorgeous glory ala the recent Bava Blu-rays of Erik the Conqueror and Blood and Black Lace. Come on, someone! If Arrow did a double of Hercules and Hercules Unchained as gorgeous as their other Bavas, you can bet it would be a hit. With Tim Lucas, of course, doing the commentaries! Zeus, hear our collective plea! 

SMALL PRAYER:

 One of those I mention, Steve Reeves in HERCULES (1958, above) is also on Tubi, Check it out and you'll see what I mean about the difference between Reeves and Park. This one starts out instantly bogged down in flashback court intrigue narrative as Dejanara tells the story of the evil way her father came to power, so rather than becoming enslaved by momentum we're already dozing as our brains are filled with Macbeth-style machinations mused through the faraway recollections of a child. Yeesh. When is Herc gonna bend some bars and throw some discuses? Finally he does, and it gets good, but what a tease that we can't even enjoy the gorgeous Bava-lit sets (he was art director and you can see his thumbprint on every night interior shot,) since it's so unrestored/remastered. Oh Zeus, if it is your will that mortal men may once again delight in Bava's lighting for HERCULES and HERCULES UNCHAINED, please make it so.

Further Tubi Viewing: Erik the Conqueror (1961), Hercules (1958)

Angela Featherstone as Veronica Iscariot
7. DARK ANGEL: THE ASCENT
(1994) Dir. Linda Hassani
****

I had to put one of the many Full Moon gems on here; Tubi is rife with them! I'm no fan of 90% of all that stuff, i.e. the Puppet Master series, not that I've given it much of a chance, but I love this little gem so much so that this is the four hundredth time I've written about it!! Shot through a haze of red and blue with just the right amount of imagination (neither too whimsical nor grungy), this demon daughter meets human doctor love story is like The Little Mermaid x Species with a refreshing lack of hangups about sex, God, or killing. Hell, we learn, is part of God's kingdom, and God hates sin so much he punishes it with eternal damnation. Thus, demons do god's work! Angela Featherstone stars as the young, wistful demoness Veronica, who's about to come of age and take over torturing the embezzling bankers of Hell, but she dreams instead of seeing the surfaces of Earth and walking under the sky. Even thinking such a thing is forbidden by her sputtering, over-acting demon father (the "psycho's psycho," Nicholas Worth) but Veronica and her dog Hellraiser ignore his outbursts and sneak up to the land of men anyway, where she immediately fathoms there is plenty of evil up there to punish. Soon she's tearing the spines and hearts out of rapists and racist cops, feeding their hearts to Hellraiser, and shacking up with a handsome sweet-souled doctor named Max (Daniel Markel) who takes care of her after she's hit by a car. And if any homicide detective tries to get in her way, she just shows him the hellfire behind her glowing eyes, while making dire announcements about the grim future that awaits mankind if they continue to sin. After that, they're in no condition to arrest anyone. 

Here's what I wrote in older review: 

Like some Satanic bible school instructional video, this confusingly-titled (there are about 100 shows and movies named Dark Angel) female-directed little miracle has become one my go-to favorites the last few years, thanks to its Shelly Duvall-meets-Val Lewton-in-Ed Wood's basement mythopoetic aesthetic, its great cast and its dusky red and black color scheme (ala another favorite, Ghosts of Mars). Sure, Featherstone isn't the greatest actress in the world, but that's why she's perfect. She has a unique ability to project complete confidence and emotional vacancy at the same time.  Better (or worse) actresses would either try to be sexy (and come off campy), imperious (and come off stuffy), mean (and come off bitchy) or tough (and come off over the top), but Featherstone's assertive confidence and deadpan demeanor is such that she gets away with the actor equivalent of murder, which is just right for Matthew Freeway Bright's genius script (full of great lines like: "I don't require the blessing of the one true church to engage in sexual relations, Max.") And when she unfolds her true form--wings, horn, tail--after orgasm--while luxuriating out in the bed post their first hook-up, it's somehow very reassuring that he accepts her instantly, just as he accepts her matter-of-fact way with wrapping human hearts in newspaper to feed Hellraiser. I've only ever seen her kind of deadpan female genius--commanding both adoration and respect--in German science fiction film female characters from the 70s (as in Eleoma and Im Staub her Sterne) and in Christine McConnell, whose Curious Creations with Christine McConnell was unfairly canceled after one short season. It's still on Netflix though, and should be seen asap.. I will never forgive you for cancelling Christine McConnel after just one season, Netflix. And I will never forgive you Charles Band, for not commissioning 12 more Dark Angel sequels, each written by Bright and starring Featherston (and keeping Markel, he's great too - never tries to oversell, overreact, judge, or otherwise hinder the way 99% of other male characters surely would.) Special shout out too to Michael C. Mahon as homicide detective Greenberg, who manages to make his every reaction funny, intelligent, deadpan cool and warmly alive all at the same time. 

SMALL PRAYER

Oh Charles Band, oh Matthew Bright, please make those sequels happen. You could have Featherstone and Markel as being older and having a wayward half-mortal daughter, one who longs to go down to Hell the way her mother once longed to go to the surface world. She could also take a secret order to infiltrate heaven and expose a ring of sinners or something. Please mighty hands and winds of Full Moon and Freeways, make it be so... 

Also Check-out on Tubi Freeway and if you dare  (it's far, far darker) Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trick Baby (both written/directed by Bright.) and other Full Moon gems: Trancers, Trancers II, The Lurking Fear, From Beyond, Re-Animator, and Dagon

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And for another movie where the human guy acts just like what any cool guy would do when the girl in bed with him turned out to be a daemon.

Josephine De La Baume and Roxane Mesquida as Vampire Sisters in:
8. KISS OF THE DAMNED
(2012) Dir. Xan Cassavettes
***1/2
The smoldering eyes of cool, reserved, bearded screenwriter Paolo's (Milo Ventimiglio) meet those of the alluring but stand-offish Djuna (Joséphine de La Baume) at the local video store one night. They're both impossibly gorgeous and both giving off very lonely vibes. They're perfect for each other. They both love movies. Every lonesome dude at the video store fantasizes about this happening one night. But they can only hook up if he chains her to her bed, as she finally tells him, because she grows fangs and glowing eyes when aroused. After an impressively short bout of initial disbelief, Paolo obeys, but once he sees she's for real h's just too turned-on to care; let the bites fall where they may. It's like when you're so in love you don't bother with a condom. "I would have done anything to be with you," Paolo says, "however insane." This movie gets that. It's a level of romantic attraction that can no sooner stop for 'sanity' than a tidal wave pause to spare a sandcastle. "I know it would be wrong to stop it," Djuna says, "for both of us." So now he's one of 'them' and who are they? They've covered the entire plot of the first four Twilight films without even getting out of bed. They're legal adults, and they're cool, so it's all ok. It's paradise. She has a great place and wants him to move in - he even has an office for his writing overlooking the bay, The only problem is - Djuna has a sister - a bratty out-of-control monster who likes to kill club boys so she can feast on all the drugs in their system. (Djuna prefers hunting deer in the forest, which is kind of a cop out but whatever). Wait, was it a deer? "Everything just feels so.....heightened."


In this day and age the vampire heterosexual love thing may seem trite, but Paolo and Djuna are so good together, so model-perfect without being smug or arch about it, so clearly designed for the gorgeous lights and furnishings of Djuna's home, that it's hard not to swoon regardless of any initial impulse to hate him on principle for being yet another privileged SWM screenwriter who gets the girl and loses his agent to bloodsucking relatives. La Baume and Ventimiglio are both so beautiful on their own but have genuine 'cosmetic chemistry' that's both skin deep and soul deep. They transcend mere window dressing smolder and merge with the sets and atmosphere in a way the screen hasn't seen since Marlene Dietrich and Anna May Wong in Shanghai Express. The result is a kind of sublime cinema crack cocaine for the eye, so when Djuna's wild child vamp sister Mimi (Roxane Mesquida) shows up, needing a place to crash after laying waste to the clubs of Amsterdam, we recoil in frustration like we're Gene Tierney cockblocked by apple-cheeked cherubs in Leave Her to Heaven in reverse... Something's got to give. 

With its impeccable color schemes (all the better to perfectly bring out La Baume's gorgeous red hair and pale skin) the occasional bouts of sex (not so much it too tiresome or tacky), and the vintage mellotron and cello slink and occasional blazing electric guitar of Steven Hufsteter's score, this fits easily into the momentary blip of brilliance that was the post-60s Eurosleaze school of filmmakers in the mid '10s (see: Let the Darionioni Nuovo Entrain your Dissonance). Xan Cassavettes (daughter of John) proves she's more influenced by the early 70s Le Fanu-adapting erotica fantastique era of European 'adult' cinema than her father, which is A-OK by me. It almost doesn't even matter if Kiss of the Damned goes anywhere other than 'not very not far' - because it goes there so very coolly. There's six billion shitty softcore vamp love stories cranked out every year but Xan took the same budget and parameters and delivered a groovy, cool, retro head trip, easy on the eyes and ears while delivering all the sexy shocks the genre demands. It would be a classic like Daughters of Darkness or Vampyres if it was made in 1969. It will be.... it has all the time in the world, and vill never age. These vamps can even drink wine if they want to, and eat human food, if the mood strikes them, they can even deliver bourgeois European dinner party style dialogue and/or cut loose in club kid threeways. But not forever.

See also on Tubi: Scarlet Diva, Daughters of Darkness, Vampyres, and...

Maria Rohm as Wanda
9. VENUS IN FURS
(1966) Dir. Jess Franco
***
Made in swinging 1966, this is one of Jess Franco's most accessible, least boring works, a solid kind of gateway not only into the oeuvre of the most prolific filmmaker of all time. So prolific that there's only one guy whose seen them all, and it's not even Franco himself (hint: it's Stephen Thrower). If you take only his first features in black and white (Awful Dr. Orloff, Diabolic Dr. Z, Attack of the Robots) plus a judicious selection ofthe films he cranked out in the mid-late-60s-70s: Venus in Furs, Succubus, Vampyros Lesbos, etc. you'd have a picture of a  pretty psychedelic, sexually disturbed cinematic genius whose works seem designed for the kind of deep dish acid trips when you feel trapped in an expensive European bordello, waiting for buddy Klaus Kinski to finish up and come downstairs so you can escape with your drinking partner and resume your chaotic drinking, regardless of where you actually are (i.e. in your living room, on the floor, clutching the carpet like you're about to be pulled north by a terrible wind). You're way too stoned to be able to get there, or anywhere, and maybe you just saw a girl you thought was dead--you saw her body! you saw her killed for kicks by three jaded jet-set freaks (Dennis Price,  Margaret Lee as a sadistic lesbian photographer and your buddy Klaus!) at a jaded jet-set party where you were blowing some crazy trumpet. And now she's back, in various wigs, with a fur coat and nothing underneath, seducing and destroying those three swinging drugged out jet set murderers via various druggy trippy seduction tableaux. Meanwhile you continue blazing away on your trumpet for a jazz combo that includes the composer on piano and Franco himself on trombone, watching as she saunters into various stoned parties while you're in Rio for Carnivale. Every night she comes in a different wig, seducing and destroying each in turn, as portraits on walls, mirrors, and great Daniel White drug music blearies and interlocks and skittles and grind and galderflaps. 


Each erotic kill seems to stop time itself in a languid and very Franco way. Afterwards, the blazing soul anthem sung by co-star and romantic rival Barbara McNair comes rising up, a soulful anthem of phoenix style vengeance and affirmation. Nair is the one likeable person in the whole film: her need for warmth and connection runs like a live heating coil through the icy proceedings, giving great balance to the cold dead inexorability of Rohm's Wanda. So Jimmy, the narrating trumpet hero and patient girlfriend McNair book a gig playing at a hotel suite in Rio, where the music never stops, and the music is jazz, and the jazz is pretty good since Franco himself is a jazz musician. In fact the whole film moves like some dreamy jazz until the druggy Daniel White plodding comes in and everything changes color and moves to slow motion. Slowing things down in a unique and vivid way while saturating the colors, Franco shows you the effect Corman was going for during all those color-tinted image distorted dream sequences in his Poe films. Those sequences didn't really work but Franco's do. They capture the sluggish druggy dragging clock-melting tempo just right. In the end, well we all know the end, don't we, Jimmy? That's not your trumpet you found buried in the sand. I'll say no more, except save this for the last film of the night, when you're mostly drunk and/or falling asleep. The best Franco films, like his compatriot Jean Rollin's, seem to facilitate trances. You can call that 'boredom' if you want, but you'll miss out; you can say that about Tarkovsky too. The trance state doesn't put you all the way asleep, just about half-way; then the movie goes the other half, and meets your unconscious self beyond some border somewhere our conscious minds are not allowed to go. Don't worry, they'll be back soon. They have no money. So don't get uppity when calling Franco a bore, think of this as a Tarkovsky movie only with sex, drugs, murder, and jazz instead of familial relationships, God, Russian history, and the ambivalence of nature. It's all the same thing in the end, or is it?

Caroline Munroe as Stella Starr
10. STARCRASH
(1978) Dir. Luigi Cozzi (Lewis Coates)
****1/2

All right - this list is all over the map. But whatever,  I had to add this too, I've written about it before. Why? Because I've seen it twenty times since I wrote about it last (in my Cozzi pean) and, a few caveats aside (El's Texas accent, Marjoe Gortner's hair), I love it unconditionally and am so glad it's on Tubi, where I can get at it quick if I'm too messed up to pop in my DVD and need relief fast. Mesmerizing with its naive gusto, it's the kind of movie my 14 year-old self would have made if I was given the budget, the cast, and told nothing beyond imitate Star Wars, (but I secretly imitated Golden Voyage of Sinbad and the 1936 Flash Gordon at the same time). I can't believe I avoided it all these years due to being a snob about dubbing. Well, I have found it now, and will never let it go. the spray red, blue, and gold, lavender and yellow-green spray painted ships and Lite Brite stars alone make me delirious with happy place serenity. 

Written with a breathless narrative speed and bedecked with cool modular space ship interiors and imaginative costumes, and determined to cram as many wild moments as possible rather than explore any one tangent. Cozzi has been called by many--including me--the 'Italian Ed Wood' and I hope he realizes that's the ultimate compliment. For Wood's popularity stems from the purity of his love for horror and sci-fi fantasy apparent in his almost home movie underground aspirations and love for the genuine oddities from the unemployment offices of Tinseltown. Starcrash covers not just Star Wars   everything from the 1936 Flash Gordon serial (sexy amazons, an escape from space furnace slavery, a lack of concern about the realities of space travel), the 1974 The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (which is why he cast lovely Caroline Munroe as Stella Starr and kept her sultry midriff, and why there's stop motion sword fight vs. two skeleton-like "golems") and even a nod to the glass-encased head of Invaders from Mars (1953). 

Naive touches abound: rather than painting everything battleship grey or adding lots of wear and tear on the ship exteriors like in Star Wars, here the ships and floating cities are painted in great spray painted swaths of gold, blue, red, and pink; stars too glow all the colors of the Lite-Brite rainbow. At one point prince David Hasselhof's emperor dad (Christopher Plummer) commands the cosmos to "stop the flow of time," with the perfect measure of over-the-top fatherly gravitas (he could teach a masterclass in silky, hypnotic cue cared reading). Explosions are rendered n cheap video infinity effects. The best is the the big star fighter climax, where two person missiles (painted gold) shoot through evil Joe Spinell's command ship windows (!) and soldiers in cool Flash Gordon helmets and brown leather uniforms pop out, blasting their laser cannons. Cozzi cares not for tiresome laws of outer space, such as the need for pressurized cabins and/or space suits! He digs there's no oxygen; that's why Stella just needs a cute bubble helmet before she leaps through the open ship window. Yipppee!

And to top it all off, there's Plummer again, for the end, that gentle, fatherly tone practically tucking in the universe after a long busy day, looking straight into the camera and telling us that 'for a little while.... we can rest." - then BAM that John Barry music kicks up again and you're like man, now that's how you end a science fiction movie. Plummer is the perfect choice, reading us his cue cards like he'd read us a children's story, his crazy Versace-gone-wild gold armor and nifty throne glowing dully in the lights. He's how I hope God turns out to be. I hope he's in heaven now, wearing that outfit, waiting for all of us who loved him to come up so he can hold our hands in his giant silver gloves. 

Karen Mok and Kit Ying Lam as the Spiderweb Sisters
11 - BONUS!. A CHINESE ODYSSEY - PART 1: PANDORA'S BOX
(1995) Dir. Jeffrey Lau 
***

Sure it can get ridiculously slapstick with more kicks and burns to the crotch than in all of Stephen Chow's other films but A Chinese Odyssey, one of the man adaptations of the classic text by.  also relentlessly imaginative and packed with lunatic detail - the story of the Monkey King, his monk teacher guiding to reincarnation, his pal who gets turned into a pig, etc, and becomes romantically entangled with spider women in their Cave of Silken Web, on their journey to the West, is apparently a big mythic deal in China, akin to a combination Wizard of Oz and New Testament for us 'gwilos'. It's been told numerous times in numerous ways, but HK funnyman Stephen Chow is a natural Monkey King, and Karen (Naked Killer) Mok, a most kickass HK superstar, is his spider woman love interest. Things are way weirder here than you get in the Wizard of Oz or the bible. Like most HK films, this breezes by in a giddy high-octane rush of action, wild (analog) effects and sometimes groan-inducing slapstick. But if you stick with the confusion long enough, you can bask in the strong confident performances of Mok and Chu as the spider sisters who wind up bonded to two hapless bandits when they all hole up in the same blasted desert battlement, trying to patch up their romance and/or protect their newborn whom is slated to grow up to be the 'longevity monk' so eating him means immortality and vast power, so every evil god in town wants to eat him (HK myths don't f--ck around). The sisters are there to find the monkey king so they can eat him and get his powers before any of the other demons, but who and where is he? Since he's reincarnated he could be anyone. The 'good' sister is furious because he was slated to marry her and then ran away like the commitment-phobic monkey shitheel he is. But who and where is the longevity monk?  


The big climax helps us to find out but also has the two women using their dazzling sword skills to protect their hapless mortal mates from a giant, sarcastic bull god who can shoot lasers out of the ring in his nose (just as the sisters can shoot spider webs out of their mouths, and t's all very romantic, feminist (since the girls have vast powers and sword skills and the men are helpless) and hilarious (aside from 200 crotch kicks too many). I still haven't finished part 2 (also on Tubi) as my yen for HK fantasy ran out (it periodically does), as I moved my obsession over to 50s-80s bad cinema classics like The Brainiac and Frozen Scream. Of them, now, I just can't get enuff. They're coming in my next Tubi Cue list - Tubi Cue 2: Where are you?

See other HK fantasy gems also on Tubi: The Bride with White Hair, The Bride with White Hair 2, A Chinese Odyssey part 2. 


See also on Tubi: 


COMING SOON: My Tubi Cue 2 The Ed Wood Edition: including Dagon, From Beyond, The Lurking Fear, The Child, and My Tubi Cue 3 Halloween Edition, Happy October!

RIP Christopher (from Starcrash) 'for a little while, we can rest.' 

The Exaltation of Defeat: Ed Wood's FINAL CURTAIN (1957), NIGHT OF THE GHOULS (1959)

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"Patience is the only rewarding virtue." - Dr. Acula
It's Kenne "the Meanest Man in Movies" Duncan's big phony swami moment, and he's nailing it. His laconic gravel-pit voice resounds with John Wayne authority as he grooves a pair of rich, elderly suckers like blobs of vinyl to the believer LP payoff. They're in the 'drape room' - a black curtain shrouded space in a surreal nowhere zone that looks like backstage at a dilapidated, closed for the night theater (the ghost light long since extinguished), crossed with the janitorial void beneath an unadorned poverty row soundstage. It's like being buried alive, but in darkness rather than earth. "I have consulted with the prince of darkness who rules my destiny," says Duncan, I mean Dr. Acula (get it?).  One doesn't have to read Nightmare of Ecstasy to get the giddy, weird sensation these scenes this may have been shot at 3AM, while every other set in the world was dark. That feeling of cool isolation  works perfectly for the idea of a seance, as this is when the veil between dimensions is thinnest, the real witching hour. Suddenly the ghost stuff begins: we hear a slide whistle, then a blaring, squawking trumpet; a bouncing booming feedback squall; a clash of drums and cymbal; the smack of thunder; a guy with a white sheet over his dead dances across the screen while weird bent notes flutter. Finally a black man with a Devo hat on, eerily lit, starts furiously licking his lips and staring laciviously into the camera as we hear a pitch-shifted voice say "Mongo Mongo Mongo." 

The gathered throng look around in some dismay. Dr. Acula better get their attention before they get up and walk away - "Again, a salute to the prince of darkness." 

Whew! Saved it.

We are in one of really 'true' dream state zones in cinema, so deep it makes Lynch's Black Lodge seem like Denny's. Ostensibly, the Drape Room is, deep below the rickety house on Willow's Lake from Ed's earlier film Bride of the Monster.  It was abandoned from a fire / lightning strike that left Lobo (Tor Johnson) facially disfigured, and eager for a new master, which turns out to be Dr. Acula, who has a habit of setting up shop in haunted houses to keep the cops away and add to his spook show cred.  

At the seance are an incredulous police lieutenant in a tux (Duke Moore), a co-grifter gigolo, the pair of elderly suckers, and a gathering of skeletons, all seated; a beautiful girl in flowing blonde locks and a shoulder cut white dress walks along like a sleepwalking zombie, doubling --in a flashback to Nightmare Alley-- for one of the sucker's lost Lucille - she alone seems destined to survive the night. Outside, the Black Ghoul (Jeanne Stevens), who wears a party store crown and a black veil, wanders around killing lovers from lover's lane and whomever else. 

For Ed Wood fans, connoisseurs of chintzy spook shows, Night is the end of the line as far as his directorial monster movies go. Just scripts for other directors, and whiskey-stained smut ahoy. Only occasionally, as in the deliciously tedious Orgy of the Dead, would his flair for ghouls and graveyards once more find fruition. That's not to say there are gems to be found in the coming decade. Indeed, we shall see several of them in the weeks to come!

But first, the miracle that was the discovery of Night of the Ghouls. Wood fans like me could hardly believe it when the film surfaced--out of nowhere-- on video for the first time ever in 1984. It has everything. Even Criswell shows up, looking bloated and puffy-eyed (as he would in Orgy). Hard to believe Night of the Ghouls was made the same year as Plan Nine -which showed a crisp, ferociously focused Criswell at his desk ready for action. Here, in the coffin, his eyes are bleary, bobbing in their sockets as he follows cue cards just below the camera level. He lets you know that things he has told us in the past have been proven to be "more than fact." Convolutions like these would fall apart in the mouths of lesser men but his peculiar cadences match the language so perfectly it may be whole minutes before you realize everything he says has canceled itself out through ouroboros loop-de-loop of train-of-thought logic. The police, he informs us, are "willing to admit the existence of juvenile delinquency" (allowing for clips from The Sinister Urge and The Violent Years) but unwilling to admit in the horrors which he will now reveal to us.


 Those horrors begin at a police precinct where Inspector Clay is told he must cancel his date at the opera (an ingenious way to explain why he's wearing a tux) to head out to Willow's Lake after a girl in a white dress waved her fingernails at a lost old couple driving by, terrifying them to the extent they need an ambulance. We see the gaping mouth old couple (including Teenagers from Outer Space's Harvey B. Dunn) taking a shortcut and winding up stalled out by Willow's Lake, where a beautiful girl in a white dress terrifies them with her spidery fingernails. There's no reason why seeing a woman in white walking by the side of the road constitutes an urgent police matter bu, as with Kelton (Paul Marco) later, the onus seems to be on the scarers not on the scared (irrational fear seems to be a legit reason to shoot at someone in ways it, hopefully, no longer is). 

It has one foot in the abyss, with the kind of look into the harrowing cold void that only drunks can take without flinching. It's the Ed Wood version in its way of Under the Volcano or The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone.  When one of the two elderly grief-addled suckers, Ms. Wingate Yates-Foster, watches as her dead husband is seen to rise from a nearby coffin--his face obviously aged with make-up, his voice shrouded in echo, we can see a mix of relief and incredulity she's letting herself be so conned by so obvious a charade as the phantasm sanctions her choice of a new, young, predatory husband. "And he's splittin' the take with me, fifty/fifty" says Dr. Acula later, to his girlfriend (Valda Hansen), i.e. the prowling "white ghost."

"I'm so happy to hear you say that," Miss Yates-Foster says of her husband's sanctioning of this sleazy gigolo, "I've been so alone, since you died." There, in the resurrection chamber, as close to the grave as one can get as far as being shrouded in darkness with no one to hear you scream, her relief and conveyance of unutterable sadness seem to be choked off at the echo.  She nails that line in such a way that it creates a sobbing seizure through Ed Wood's tombstone universe, collapsing the cardboard scenery tight around her like a vacuum. The actress playing her, Marcelle Hemphill, is an unknown with no other screen credits (that imdb knows about) but her one moment, in this deep dark nest of bunco chicanery, hits deep in the same way Chaney's "We never had much time anyway" monologue hits in Spider Baby, or Lugosi's "Hunted, despised" speech in Bride of the Monster hits, i.e. these powerful bits of acting, marooned deep in impoverished fly-by-nite cult craziness, that get at the very heart of what being an outsider is. The popular kids may make fun of us, but when they're all asleep like the dutiful safety-first schmucks they are, we're downstairs in front of the TV, in full charge of the universe, until the sun rises and the first sleepy-eyed suckers wake up. If we clean up the mess, they'll never even know we were there. 

Only we, who know the terrible sting of feeling "so alone," know the highs and lows of addiction, the heartbreak and the pain, know the true joy those late night/early morning hours. When there's no one awake in the world, there is no loneliness anymore - for we contain multitudes. We understand how the misery of being alone is often such you'll sign any satanic contract, which is why we don't scoff a Mrs. Yates-Foster's choice of paramour, or warn her away, like Mrs. Stone's friends in the Roman Spring. We know the illusion granted by him is better than any sensible daytime reality. If she's smart--and she's not--she'd get a pre-nup, but there you are - she needs him and Dr. Acula is just helping out for a cut, same as any other capitalist. 

Depending on your tastes, Marco's Kelton, the rattled cop, is a liability. Learning he's being sent off to Willow's Lake with Clay, Marco mugs and overacts shamelessly and semi-ineptly, sputtering his 'b-b-buts' and noting "monsters! space people! mad doctors! They don't teach about such things at the police academy, yet that's all I've been assigned to!" His weird off-brand interpretation of Wood's dialogue earns a special star, but it's not a star anyone wants to see displayed. 

Scaring poor Kelton seems to be quite an easy thing. But it wouldn't be Ed if he didn't feel the need to touch all the same bases as his beloved Monogram Lugosi chillers, and that means comic relief, ideally bungling cops or hapless reporters. And in today's climate, the idea of police shooting at unarmed civilians, just because they happen to look scary, no longer is 'funny' like it used to be. Here in Ghouls though, even Kelton can evince growth: after being throttled by Lobo, dumped in a coffin, and rescued by Clay, we next see him relaxing on a shitty backstage couch and smoking a cigarette in a way that lets you know he's a real smoker and not some kibbitzer. He seems like a different person, just for a minute. Maybe the cigarette helps: "Mind if I rest a minute?" he asks Clay, hat off, and not hamming for the first time ever. "then I'll be ready." 

But soon he's yelling "there's my hat!" with the finesse of a bullhorn trying to sneak up on a feather.

Change doesn't change anything - we sense the abyss looming--a darkness within the darkness--that no amount of hamming will allay. We know the end of a whole genre, of life, of the night, of youth, of life, is coming,  but we're not going to go all Kelton and freak out about it, emptying our gun at phantoms and maybe hitting beautiful ghost impersonators. We are going down , and nothing can change that, but we can stand firm and not flinch, but we don't live past the credits no matter who we are. Like Tennessee Williams' later plays, Ghouls is a torch that lets us see deeper into the midnight darkness. We realize the soothing sound of a friend's voice, or a shot of rum after the parents go to bed, or even an AA pamphlet, can ease us back from the lip of the abyss. 

Wingate-Fosters' beautiful heartbreaking moment eases, like Roman Spring of Mrs Stone's love affair with Warren Beatty, the feeling of death onrushing while at the same time illuminating just how false is the warmth we cling to. Deep inside the black abyss of a D-list spook film, we feel the boozy cheer of meeting up with Ed's ragtag crew at various Hollywood bars, drinking up the budget. We feel a warm fire deep inside the blackness, beating back the aching loneliness of a town where has-beens and never-rans are shunned like a contagious plague. Bribing the night watchmen to shoot after-hours on an unrented soundstage, creeping in at 2 AM, after the bars had closed, setting up and shooting against black stage walls and stage curtains, these actors knew Wood was giving them a gift of illusion, akin to Dr. Acula's resurrection chamber. The "prince of darkness" provided these tinsel-lashed losers a small oasis -- a phantasm of boozy security deep in that black death nesting doll.... a parallel to the stay of execution the movie provides us, these decades later, as we either drink in ecstasy to Ed's wild ride or convulse on the floor in agony in front of an empty screen.  

That may sound sad, but it's a Woodsian sadness, a sweet, giddy form of surrender to the narcotic comfort of the cardboard grave. It's the final sign post on the road to ruin, a road where alcohol-fueled love of cinema trumps skill and focus. Spook show flimflam ("Mongo! Mongo"); terrified cop Paul Marco on the midnight perimeter, emptying his revolver at women and trees; Lobo with a big wad of gunk on half his face; an elder couple terrified by a young girl's long fingernails; Criswell's resonant narration; Cute Valda in her white dress doing a homage to Coleen Gray's ghost impersonation scene from Nightmare Alley; the contrast of the Black Ghost (Jeanne Stevens) wafting along, occasionally killing wandering lovers in lovers' lane,  all keep one's own slide around the perimeter of the abyss feel air-conditioned and inviting. As long as this Night of the Ghouls keeps playing, the booze keeps flowing and it's still dark out... all is well. We know this groovy movie will end, that the credits will rise, and the bottle run dry, and the sun come up, the rooster crow, our coffins bid us scurry home, back to our coffins. For now, night is on high, Duke Moore is in his tuxedo, the movie is playing, the booze is there, all is well.... the sun has been officially seen to set. If the sun will be seen to rise, well, that's tomorrow's look-out. 


THE FINAL CURTAIN IS RAISED

Night of the Ghouls is a film even the cast may have never actually seen. The legend goes it was lost for decades, deep in the bowels of a processing lab, waiting for Wood to come pay the bill. When it came video in 1984 it was as something otherworldly and brand new, Bride of the Monster's forgotten sequel. For Ed Wood fans, it also gave us a wild hope that maybe there are other, similar things--strange things-- floating out there somewhere in the ether. 

Then, in 2010, intrepid fans exhumed Wood's 1957 TV pilot, "THE FINAL CURTAIN", first in a series Ed envisioned called Portraits in Terror. When it didn't get picked up, Wood worked some footage from it into Night of the Ghouls, which finally explains why Bradford had to be wearing a tux before going up to That Old House on Willow's Lake. Duke Moore, the star of Curtain, is wearing one. Clothes got to match - even in Woodsville. 

For CURTAIN, Moore plays a haunted actor (his role onstage "The Vampire") hanging in his dressing room after the play is over and everyone is gone for the night. Why? Why has he remained in this darkened theater? Because he must find an object. as Dudley Manlove's weird, wondrous narration explains, he doesn't know which object, how big or small, only that he is afraid to find that object. But he's drawn to find.... that object. On the soundtrack there's only a few sound effects and an internal monologue read with mounting, and then mounting some more, hysteria.

Things don't add up from the beginning: the stage of the theater is dressed is a quaint one-room rustic cabin, making us wonder how a vampire in a tux could possibly fit in. We never learn, instead we watch Moore wander around the empty theater (it was probably all shot in a single night, maybe they even snuck in after hours?), his eyes bugged out in horror while Manlove oomphs up any weird vibes that Ed can riff up on from nothing more than tied up cords of roope, rafters, lights, and railings. And riff he does. The rows of darkened audience seats seem like "squatty little fat men standing row after row..." A stray wind witching hour might be "a spirit coming in for a night of pleasure" (which Manlove pronounces "play-zsher."). He hears "a creak in the galleries!" A chill passes through him. "A rattle in the pipes! Somewhere overhead!" 

There is so little movement, other than that of Bradford, eyes bugging out ever more as he beholds things like curtain rigging, electric switches, and open windows leading out to the noise-filled night; backstage he enters cavernous maze of storage and dressing rooms, the wide hallways make us realize we may no longer be in a quaint downtown theater, but a cavernous and dilapidated soundstage. Manlove is ready to lose his shit: "I cannot tell where space ends and the auditorium walls begin. But... do I really want to know?!" Thunder crashes, eerie chiming organ notes are almost subliminally low in the mix. The railing up to the dressing rooms seems to vibrate in his hand and is "like a cold, slimy, snake!"  The stairs ring "louder than I have ever heard them ring before!"

If not for the hysterical voiceover--prime Ed at his most gloriously neurotic (commenting on every sensation, including the clammy cold of a railing, the echo of a step, the yowling of a cat, that stacking of some newspapers on a dressing room stool, etc. After awhile, one longs for a slight movement in the dark of the theater, the sign of some swaying curtain, a shadow, or something to happen to justify Moore's irrational terror / Manlove's quivering neurosis. Shots repeat over and over - a stack of newspapers on a stool; ropes tied and hanging in the rafters; the winding empty rows of darkened seats; a sky light (showing a daytime sky - but no matter). Remember those? 

Some of the VO babble returns in Orgy of the Dead ("I know I should think of other things....pleasant things" and the line about "monsters to be pitied; monsters to be despised" which we hear/read in both Orgy and Night of the Ghouls). Criswell borrows some phrases for his narration of Inspector Clay's sensations in Night of the Ghouls, riffing on the cold, clammy railing, this time not a snake but something "cold... clammy.... like the dead!"). But who can fault a drunk for repeating himself especially as he must have presumed no one would ever see this, since it was never picked up. That we're talking about it now is a comfort to any outsider artist who labors on projects that have no ready audience. In 50 or 60 years, who knows? 

But no outsider artist can touch the delirious inclusive nocturnal madness that is prime Ed Wood: whipping up a story out of nothing more than a spooked actor walking around an empty theater, voiceover free-styling in prime and priceless examples of his nightmarish ecstasy, the delirious radiance he finds in just about anything. This is why he reminds me too of being a young child in the 70s, still the height of the classic monster craze, when we'd make haunted houses out of the rec room, and conjure vast spires gothic madness from a few plastic skulls, a scary sound effects record, a bowl full of cold noodles, and a blindfold. The spook details would fill themselves in with our titanic imaginations. With Ed, that swooning adoration for the macabre survives into adulthood, beyond all opposites-- good and bad, alive or dead, nothing and something, alone and together, drunk with boozy ecstasy, and obliterated by the cold dead sleep of the intoxicated.

So yeah, even so, nothing in The Final Curtain happens until the final 'twist' - EXCEPT a memorably surreal scene that would be folded into Orgy: Moore finds Jeanie Stevens ("The Black Ghoul") motionless in a props room, dressed in gossamer Max Reinhardt Titania white, standing still and looking blankly at him in a scene so wondrously strange and eerie it's as if it belongs in yet a different show, maybe the other unaired episode of Portraits of Terror, "The Cry of the Banshee." rumored to exist somewhere in that eternal Woodian limbo. 

Stevens is marvelous. Was she only available for an hour or so? Is that why there's so little of her? Whatever happened to her, or Hansen, or Hemphill, or any of them, these one-shot actresses who wafted through the Ed-verse? Most of them are precious and to be cherished, especially in this phase of his career, the Orgy / Night / Curtain phase.

They may be gone, but, to paraphrase Criswell, they get to rise from their coffins once a year (or more) when a powerful medium (like video) calls them back into the land of the visible. They may need to creep back to the void come the dawn, but then again so do you. The parents will be waking up soon and you don't want your dad to find you looking like this. See you soon.... in the grave!!


 

read my 2009 praise of Night of the Ghouls hhere

Gorilla, mon Amor: Ed Wood's THE BRIDE AND THE BEAST (1958) + UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956)

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"If you must go into the jungle, leave her there!"
In old movies, gorillas (i.e. guys in gorilla suits) do many things: they break out of cages, creep behind secret panels, and--in a grand burlesque of controversial Darwinism-- try to mate with human women, Gorillas never actually get to mate with human women, though. Someone always shoots them first. That was the law.

In 1956, Ron Orman struck a gong and declared: Law... no more! 

Ron (MESA OF LOST WOMEN) Ormond's UNTAMED MISTRESS (1956) is the film. Velda (Jacqueline Fontaine) is the girl. Velda grew up with the apes in deepest Africa, was mated to the chief, then 'rescued' by a Maharaja (Brian Keith). A sizable chunk of (quickly forgotten) filler from an old Sabu movie tells how he came to Africa on a hunting expedition, fell for a local girl who didn't like him, heard a jungle boy named Sabu was tipping off the animals (but never saw him - part of the deal Ormond made for the footage), lost his fortune when he obtained a cursed shrunken head; then he roamed the plains as a penniless freelance guide; and then found Velda after killing her ape lover in a fight. Now he's dying and asking these young hunters to return a cursed shrunken head to its point of origin, and to bring Velda back to her 'people.' Velda no like him. 

All caught up, the 'raj cautions the age and species-appropriate Jack (Allan Nixon) against Velda (they've already fallen in love, sort of) : "Do you not believe," he cautions, "that someday her soft caresses could turn into hairy steel claws at your throat?" 

He dies. Jack and his crew haul off on safari (a desert ranch fills in for the Congo) with Velda as guide. Jack doesn't want to know about Velda's past--doesn't want to even think about it--but the older guys in the safari say "Wise up Jack - she's not a woman, she's a beast."  A lush and fecund brunette with a low slung peasant blouse and pale skin that has somehow eluded a tan, Velda's no beast, but she does love Jack rather roughly. If an ape made out, that would be how she kisses. He's unnerved.

Like all B-movie safaris, there's a lot of wandering around, pointing at mismatched stock footage (courtesy Ormond's neighbor's vacation movies) and providing narration travelogue ("the zebra as usual was comical to look at..) But no other narration of such footage had previously dared to ask: "Could natural selection influence the mating instinct of a girl who was brought up half human, half gorilla?" 

When things get dull Velda dances; a shrunken head magically flies into her hands like a gift from the trees. She pulls up her skirt to show her plump things and twirls around the shrunken head. Where is her music coming from? Later, natives attending a tribal dance in the stock footage wear shirts and baseball caps, clearly modern Africans out on the weekend; one wonders what they'd think if they knew they were portraying headhunting savages who send a beautiful maiden each year to placate the lusts of a neighboring gorilla tribe."Every year Garuda come for sacrifice," explains Velda, "for girl."

"The natives consider it an honor, declares Jack's guide, adding "none of the have ever been found dead." Hmmm.

Whatever your thoughts on just what that means, it's worth sticking around for the sudden, lurching, super WTF finale. In fact, it's worth all of the bad movies you ever watched. All the times you felt bad for the gorilla dying at the end --paid in full!
 
A hit in the mid-50s southern markets, Untamed must have tapped right in to the sludgy vein of redneck miscegenation and anti-evolution anxiety that was fermenting in advance of the Civil Rights era. Today it works for a different reason. Personally, I love it, because of all the time I spent as a child rooting for the bad guys in my afternoon cartoons (namely Speed Racer), day-after-day I tuned in, thinking this time they'll win, just from the law of averages. Finally my mom could stand it no more - and told me the facts - the bad guys would never win, ever. 

I was devastated. I never watched Speed Racer again. Well, after that, after watching King Kong a hundred times and always the same sad ending, at least I was prepared. With Untamed Mistress, I feel the same surge of joy I hadn't felts since Django Unchained.


Two years later: Ed Wood and Adrian Weiss (Jack's brother) sidestepped unconscious racial subtext by introducing civilized modern woman and ape in a well turned-out mansion boudoir and made it less about did they or didn't they and more about reincarnation and the idea that, in a past life, a human could have been "queen of the gorillas."  

Dan (Lance Fuller) is a big game hunter millionaire with an adult male gorilla (named Spanky!) behind the secret panel in his boudoir. New bride Laura (Charlotte Austin) wants to meet him!  The honeymoon is literally stormy, with crashing thunder and flashes of lightning. Dan's study is laden with taxidermy animals and animal skin rugs. Laura has a striped angora sweater that she rubs a lot, as if chilly, but in a languid, beguiling way. She and Spanky hit it off. She seems psychically connected to him; during her fitful sleep that night, she dreams of the jungle, as if channelling Spanky and encouraging him to break the bars and come to her. Spanky does. Dan wakes up in time to shoot Spanky right as he tears off her nightgown. She doesn't sleep well after that, just keeps rubbing her angora fur, and whisper-talking about her 'weird sensation.'

Everything takes on a sinister sense of dislocated giddy wonder when Ed Wood is writing the dialogue. He makes the proceedings as resonant with B-movie and personal touches as he can; Spanky is kept in a basement lit by torches and accessible via secret panel. Nothing is played for carny side show sleaze because Ed's compassion for his freaks is without measure.  We root for the ape to get the girl from the beginning. Dan never does anything evil, but we can't help but feel there's something 'off' about him, something akin to Herb Evers in Brain that Wouldn't Die. 

Next morning, Dan and Laura need to talk about this like adults. Dan declares her reaction to Spanky's caress was not "normal."  She keeps remembering the jungle, the animals. A hypnotherapist announces Laura was, in a distant past life, 'queen of the gorillas!' Will their already scheduled honeymoon on African safari let her work it out of her system?   Not sure why Dan thinks bringing her to the land of the apes is a good idea. But for us, and for Laura, and Africa's single gorillas, it surely is ideal. The animal trainer male / animal female pair bond archetype goes way back, from Marnie to Captive Wild Woman.  It usually only ends one or two ways. But there is yet a third.

Laura worries: "Dan will think he's married to an idiot or something."

Then the film gets--- according to some critics, including monkey suit maniac John Landis--a little dull. To stand-in for Africa, Weiss folds in lots of tiger (!) footage from Man-Eater of Kumaon (1948) and safari shots from Bride of the Gorilla (1951). Landis doesn't care for such cost-cutting measures, but me, Ive always had a soft spot for scenes of actors shooting at stock footage. Though some of the driving and chasing down giraffes and antelopes scenes--evocative of Hatari--are kind of alarming, one may rest assured the actors were nowhere around any of these creatures. Furthering the abstraction, when Laura dreams her way into the jungle past, the animal footage is shown in negative. This is even better since we can just see hypnogogic spirals, Austin's pretty sleeping face, super-imposed over it; Laura's zonked hypnotized voice names each animal is it appears in the footage as we see her past life ape POV ("trees and vines don't seem to bother me. I push right through them.")

 Ed spares us the usual cliches. Laura is no victim or savage, just legitimately capable and turned on by Africa ("the jungle really gets in your blood, doesn't it?"). She digs the danger; she doesn't mope over the animals being killed, nor try to rescue prey items from carnivores the way Tarzan does. Speaking throughout the movie in a cool sexual purr, both mature and open-minded, sexy yet reaching deep in herself in answer to some strange 'sensation.' Austin doesn't overdo it or make the character ridiculous, campy, or misguided. And marvel at how Ed slips in a rhapsody over his "angora sweater" into her hypnotized ramblings ("soft like kitten's fur -- it felt so good on me.")  


I'd rather see Bride and the Beast twice than the entirety of the Captive Wild Woman trilogy once, so there you go.

Both films are currently on Prime, and if you don't have it, they're still floating around...You'd be a fool to miss them. Come to think of it, you'd be a fool to see them, too. 

Darwin, you old so-and-so, you must feel pretty proud of yourself.

"You'll feel rested," notes the hypnotist, "but you'll want a cigarette."

"Your powers are lightnings!!" Ed Wood's REVENGE OF DR. X (aka VENUS FLYTRAP)

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"I'll make you the most powerful thing on the universe! (sic)
Move over Kenne Duncan, James Craig is on his way to the podium and he's in a shoving mood. Ignored far too long due to its twilight identity (it wound up with the wrong credits, leading one to think it was an Eddie Romero Filipino "Blood" movie), the Craig-starring, Wood-scripted Revenge of Dr. X  (aka Body of the Prey, aka Venus Flytrap) has been rediscovered via Wood scholars and correctly attributed to him on imdb and elsewhere. All you have to do is count the number of thunderstorms and a hear a few minutes of dialogue and you know the truth. The climax finds a crazed rocket scientist-cum-botanist cradling a baby goat in his arms, and shouting "Insectovarus!" while looking down on a volcano. This may be filmed in Japan, but we're in Woodland USA. 

Dr. Bragan (Craig) is a Cape Kennedy rocket scientist with a lot of stress-related issues; this mainly consists of berating other scientists about the importance of accurate calculations ("Could-be's I cannot use! I need facts! Facts, do you hear?" and appearing superimposed over some NASA stock footage. His Japanese (male) assistant convinces Bragan to take the summer off: "Japan is very beautiful... this time of the year." Soon he's driving up the coast (in case he finds some "interesting flora and fauna along the way") before catching the plane to Tokyo, to 'relax' while his space capsule or whatever is heading off to Venus. 

real life Ama
After stopping at the gas station of a muddy-faced snake handler (Al Ricketts) after car trouble, Bragan realizes instantly he's found just the right subject to bring to Japan, right there in the middle of the snake cages (unseen): the Venus Flytrap! He digs one up, keeps it in a little box and gives it a seat on the plane. He's smitten with this thing. Apparently, Darwin wrote about it being the most evolved of plants, so Bragan figures he can turn it human, kind of. 

His assistant's cousin "Noriko (Atsuko Rome) meets Bragan at the airport with orders to be his assistant. She takes him to a bar to get sake. This film was shot with live sound and English is clearly not her first language, but then again, this really isn't English as you are I speak it. This is Wood wording, so it sounds even more unnatural and uncanny. But she will be a good assistant but get on his nerves by forevder trying to get him to take a nap or eat breakfast; he has no time! He cares only for his project. This is supposed to be a vacation but he's madder than ever, but not always. There's time for picnincs and long drives.

Their days click by in a delirious montage set to kooky but soothing and jubilant organ music that sounds like Raymond Scott's "Music for Baby" crossed with Candace Hilligoss's Carnival of Souls scorethe hunchback caretaker of Bragan's remote Osaka greenhouse laboratory plays Bach's Toccata Fugue (over and over) on the organ, raises a brood of ever-yapping puppies, and he too keeps what looks like big smears of mud on his face (like Rickets at the gas station!). Noriko and Bragan drive to Tokyo to buy lab supplies;  Noriko and Bragan drink sake. They pull over to admire the view. They get to know one another. They drive up the side of the volcano and are almost crushed by falling rocks. But we don't care, because the music and dialogue are so weird. Maybe the director and producers didn't understand English enough to make script changes, and the actors weren't much for improvising, so we get an English language (not dubbed) film shot in Japan, written by Ed Wood, so like all the best worlds. 

And that crazy score never relents: nouncing oboes, sudden military snare rolls, and xylophones running through scales accompany his Florida drives and when Bragan lands in Japan the bouncing lute and bent-ling chimes start up. The soundscape contains a sound effects record worth of noises: thunder, sea gulls, crashing surf, crows caws, cock crows, puppies whining, the whirring of electrical appliances (with animated electric current!); long strange whistles, wind whipping the willows, all topped off a glistening organ so full of roller rink jubilation it seems at times to not know what kind of the film it's in. The beach scenes underwater and by the ocean are dreamy with a blend of church organ, rolling surf, swirling lute, chimes, skittering xylophone and a never-ending stream of bubbles. The soundscape you hope to hear while getting your Ativan shot at the mental hospital and swooning into a pleasurable coma. 

"now you bring the red to my face," 
Bragan is at the beach to find a sample of the "Venus" Vesiculosa' - an underwater version of the flytrap which he finds with the help of some topless local Japanese Ama(upper left) he and Noriko recruit on the beach. He wants to splice the two together and so they are soon wiling away the hours in her family's remote volcanic greenhouse. He also doing a lot of skulking around at night through yon stormy graveyard, which Noriko watches from her bedroom, in a negligee; she would be amenable, no doubt, but he only has eyes for his creature - "Insectovarus" who he as Nietzscheanly as James Mason does his son in Bigger than Life.  ("You can move, I'll make you move!") He reasons to be more human it will need human blood: "If it takes the blood of a human heart to prove my theory, you will have the blood of a human heart!" (it never occurs to him he could just do a transfusion or go to the blood bank and that blood is the same all through the body - 'blood from a human heart' is almost redundant; yet he has to sneak into a hospital and withdraw it from a sleeping topless female patient. Ed Wood writes scientific inquiry with the zeal of a twelve year-old kid bluffing his way through a science project ("the human element"). 

Still, he would never quit splicing in the Lugosi gothic style to the 50s atomic age overreach and for that he should get the Nobel Prize. Frankenstein of course is the ultimate sci-fi gothic. And Wood pays homage to it all over the place. Most especially he draws on Son of Frankenstein with Lugosi's Ygot talking about "your mother was the lightning" given three attempts by a drunk Bragan. First:
"You can think. You can reason. You must be part-human. But like all humans you're weak!  I'll find a way. Mark my words, I'll find a way. make you the most powerful thing on this universe (sic). Your mother was the soil... perhaps.... the lightning will become your father!" 
Later he tries again: "your father will be the rain! Your mother was the soil, maybe your father will be the lightning!" But then he even gives a second variation later on: "Your father will be the rain! your powers are lightnings!" and later he drives it home while drinking and staring at Insectovarus with growing cranky aggression and love: "I do love wild things! Your mother was the earth! The rain your blood! The lightning your power! Ahahahahaha! (at which point he passes out and the plant finally starts moving around.   

"as human as the human element itself"

Insectovarus grows up quickly, standing and looking around waving his arms, with fanged pink cather's mitt-style flytrap hands and feet and a radish sprout head and an upside down flower petal frill, and big empty eye sockets. It seems to talk and cry in a pitch-shifted baby voice, and when it moves we hear those weird string pull sounds most of us associate with fleas jumping on dogs' backs in Warner Brothers cartoons. Noriko wants it destroyed ("I wish that thing had died!" and for Bragan to take better care of himself ("you should eat!") She's very obsessed with rest and nutrition, reflecting no doubt Ed's cagey worship/resentment towards the maternal.  He barks at her ("Stop harping!"), sheepishly apologizes, and comes in for breakfast. As Joseph Ziemba says the film has a "beautiful warmth.

Insectovarus needs to eat too. And there are lots of dogs around... for awhile. 

Once shopped around as the B-list Clark Gable, Craig mostly worked in westerns, like Wood's pal Kenne Duncan. and Wood loved westerns, all of which make the pair a perfect match. Craig's burly boom of a voice captures the booze-blasted rapture in Wood's writing that few others have. The cranky inconsistency--the bug-eyed ruefulness, the angry outbursts and apologies; the slow disoriented wake-ups; the thunder crash 4 AM ecstasy ("I do love the wild things)--is the hallmark by which alcoholic writers, actors, and directors lose the war of the moment, but win the posthumous cult. Ed's out-there dialogue is a series of ropes over a yawning chasm of fire and ole Craig is swinging across, roaring like a kamikaze bull walrus acrobat, realizing the words don't make sense only as he says them, after he's already swinging for the next senseless sentence, holding on for dear life. 

We can feel Ed's love for the wild things all through the script: Bragam sticks up for his monster even when it's caught dead to rights, with the hunchback's dog's collar hanging out of its mouth, Dr. Bragan champions its innocence. When it tries to kill the hunchback, Dr. Bragan jumps to its defense ("What did you do to him!??")  Insectovarus only goes out on the town when Bragan and Noriko are asleep; he can even knock people unconscious by releasing special spores. The climax finds Insectovarus loose and Noriko and Bragan hearing stories he's rampaging through the village. We do see him approaching and presumably eating a child, sparking the citizenry (again, shades of Frankenstein). We do see townspeople creeping up the face of the volcano with torches but they're more like a funeral procession than an angry mob. Dr. Bragan tells Noriko he must go up and find his beast alone and bring with him, only a "small farm animal." His last words to Noriko "Noriko, stay... stay here"sound like he's talking to a dog trying to follow him home Knowing Ed as we do, we know a small part of him (and us) wanted to see Dr. Bragan  and his monster escape the torch-wielding villagers and flee to the next town, splitting the baby goat along the way. But Bragan and his creation fall into the volcano together, rather sudden and matter of factly, leaving Noriko holding the goat. The goat lives!

That sums it up but I am barely scratching the surface. In every corner of the film, ideas cohere and dissipate. For awhile it looks like Dr. Bragan's hand is going to turn into a Venus flytrap after he refuses to wash out a cut (he has "no time for bandages!") but then if it was going to figure in the climax, it doesn't. Noriko mentions her rich father is "too busy making money" to spend time with her, which goes nowhere. When Noriko lights a cigarette and puts it in his mouth after he comes to from a drunken black-out, he says "I've forgotten how sweet your licorice could be" (was a romantic moment edited out?) There's so many unanswered dead ends: why is the foley soundscape so rich with animal noises? Why does the gas station owner/mechanic in the US (Al Ricketts) who fixes Dr. Bragan's car look like he just gave himself a mud facial? Why is he holding a snake in either hand? Why is the hunchback's face apparently covered with lines from a black magic marker? The answer is just the howl of the wind, the call of the cock, the whining of the puppies, and of the hum of electrical equipment, and the bounce of the organ, the tipple of the xylophone, and the pluck of the pizzicato string.


Eternal Rewards: ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965)

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(Night #4 of the Ten Days of Ed Wood Acidemic Holiday Special) 

If you watch Plan Nine from Outer Space two or three times a year, as many of us do, you probably wish there could be a whole movie of Vampira lolling around the mist-enshrouded graveyard, arms raised classic cartoon sleepwalker fashion. Maybe this time she could talk? Maybe was emceeing a Halloween-style strip show line-up of lost female souls summoned to dance to escape damnation? And a mummy and werewolf acted as bouncers? And there was enough mist, skulls, and Martin Denny-style lounge music to fill six ordinary movies? And Criswell ruling over all of it, lolling in his shiny black cape and mirthlessly laughing as women are doused in liquid gold? Such a dream would be--in the words of a bare bodkin-contemplating Hamlet, devoutly to be wished! 

ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965) has what you need, oh bare bodkin-fancier: Fawn Silver as the Black Ghoul isn't quite on Vampira's level, but she does manage to keep a straight face as she introduces the girls. Criswell, the Emperor of Darkness, looks all boozed-up--dilated and doughy, glazed-eyed and cue card-dependent--but his hair and black cape shine in the starlight and his voice is the same never-ending source of resonant delight and his words, written and cue-carded by the great Ed Wood, send the whole thing over into paroxysms of surrealist bliss:

Now all we need is a reprint of
Ed's original novel, please
"It is said on clear nights, beneath the cold light of the moon, howl the dog and the wolf, and creepy things crawl out of the slime; it is then the ghouls feast in all their radiance." 

Only Wood would describe his ghouls as "radiant." You can feel his love for his monsters - even if they are to be "pitied" and "despised." His affection permeates the ether  and extends even to the moon, which "comes forth once more to shine in radiance and contentment." 

 Contentment indeed. Can you doubt it. The weird language continues as Criswell sets the scene:

 "Time seems to stand still. Not so the ghouls, when a night of pleasure is at hand!"

He's sure right on one level - time does seem to stand still. 

And thus we meet two members of the living world: burly horror writer Bob (Edward Bates) and his stacked but virgin redhead girlfriend Shirley (Fawn Silver) are in the car, headed off to a remote graveyard under a spooky full moon. Why? Bob needs inspiration for his monsters and full moons are the best time to go. She would rather not; and insistence on dragging her there seems disrespectful, but who are we to judge? She wishes he'd write about something other than monsters (you can imagine Ed's first, very square, wife and/or girlfriend Dolores Fuller, harping on these very points). Bob argues: "My monsters have done well for me," Bob says, "they sell in the top spots. You want me to give all that up and write about trees, or dogs, or daisies?"  

Their love life is--we glean--a nonstarter too (maybe like Ed's first wife, who the story goes, was holding out for marriage, and then divorced him as soon as she 'met' Glenda): "Your puritan upbringing holds you back from my monsters, but it certainly doesn't hurt your art of kissing."  Like Brad and Janet in Rocky Horror Picture Show, it's clear these two are going to need a night orgy, with some degenerate swinger undead, to loosen sexual repression's buzzkill shackles. But will it loosen them too much, as in from their mortal coils? It all depends on how fast the dawn comes. 

The dance floor is a cemetery clearing, flanked by above ground tombs, and surrounded by grave markers and ominous portent (i.e. swirling fog). Seated on the stairs around one of the tombs comes Criswell, Emperor of the Night, who bids the Black Ghoul (Fawn Silver), his right hand woman, to come monster-walking forth (i.e. slowly, with arms outstretched in front like a cartoon sleepwalker). A werewolf and a mummy watch and do the Emperor's bidding, as do a pair of mute dudes in island native wear who escort, whip and dip the dancers into a liquid gold cauldron as needed. In sum, Criswell is not playing around: "If I am not pleased by tonight's entertainment I shall banish their souls to everlasting damnation!" And with that...

THE PARADE  BEGINS

And thus, with a clap of the Black Ghoul's hands, comes the first in a very long line: a Native American fire dancer, "one who loves flame,' says the Black Ghoul, "Her lover was killed in flame... She died in flame." As a kind of lounge-era version of Native American chants and tribal drumming plays on the score, she 'dances' as if half-heartedly trying to remember a calisthenics class.  At one point the music ends. We see a shot of Criswell, barely awake --are we done!? Not so fast! The needle is pulled back and the tom-toms beat on! A fire is burning to symbolize flame but for some reason the camera keeps it offscreen. A streetwalker (Colleen O'Brien), (one who prowls the lonely streets of life is bound to prowl them in eternity") sashaying barefoot to a laid-back Spanish guitar, tinny piano and hazy sax combo, is next. Much better. With her awesome red hair, pink dress and blue feather boa, O'Brien seems to be at least able to convey a good time, winking at the camera (which Criswell loves in a cutaway) and cavorting with a skeleton under nice Gold Key comic / pulp magazine lighting. 

"Throw gold at her!"
Next up is the "one who prized gold above else" (Pat Barington, who also plays Shirley). Natural, full but not grotesque, hers is a perfect burlesque body, and her dance gets the best introduction; lying on a slab in a comely crypt, opened by two Pacific islander type slaves, and the most loungey track, replete with bongos, mariachi trumpet, xylophone, and skittery flute. "Throw gold at her!" declares mighty Cris, adding "more gold!" over and over before cracking up in mirthless laughter.

 "For all eternity she shall have gold!" 
Obligingly melting down the gold in a big cauldron and baptizing her in it, she emerges a gold-covered corpse ala Goldfinger (which came out the year before), the natives have created the ultimate idol - we worship thee, Mickey! She really is totally gold covered. We can only hope she left a patch for her skin to breathe through! We never know, as the natives carry her back to her slab, the fog comes rolling in, the crickets and piano pound "and both couldn't help but remember a line from one of Bob's stories" and goes onto basically quote The Final Curtain, "I know I should think of other things, pleasant things, but how can I when shadows are all around me..."

Next up is one of the worst: Texas Starr in a shitty leopard costume with dark red ears ad the chest and ass cut out. "To love the cat is to be the cat," the empress says, or as Criswell puts in those honeyed tones, "a pussycat is born to be whipped." A slave whacks the ground or feebly whips her but she doesn't seem to notice, her paws bent forward, hopping as if jumping an invisible rope. Her dancing--to an idiotic xylophone riff-- with her little bunny hop and ass wiggle in her leaopard pajamas is idiotic. Criswell gets an idea, though, and notes that "it would please me very much to see the slave girl and her tortures." So we meet next a slave girl (Nadeja Klein) chained up, kinda, and whipped mercilessly ("torture! Torture, it pleasures me!" shouts Criswell) but then her whipper leaves, her chains come off and she's just a girl dancing. in that dazed 'trying to remember calisthenics' manner, as the mist in the air slowly grows to the opaque level.. She rolls around on the ground, she wafts pass the still-open crypt, tours the whole set. Waves her arms around. Her nipples seem too red for the rest of her. 

It goes on and on from there - a Spanish flamenco dancer (Stephanie Jones) struts around the skull of her bullfighter lover; "a worshipper of snakes, and smoke.. and flame" is next: she does some good Hawaiian dance hip gyrations but has strange too-white teeth and an ill-fitting Betti Page wig; we cut to a rattlesnake occasionally to imply it's jamming along with the congas and steamy sax. The Ghoul and Criswell nod at each other with conspiratorial smiles. "She pleases me," he says. "Permit her to live in the world of the snakes." Bob and Shirley start to bicker; she blames him for getting them into this mess. Next up is a bride (Barbara Norton) dancing with the skeleton of her groom. When her dress comes off the tune shakes up to a funky Herb Albert style bouncy melody and she shakes and shimmies and rattles her breasts around like she's swimming through the mist. She does this for what seems like ten minutes. This is the one the Wolf Man and the Mummy supposedly chose out of the remaining line-up, as the Ghoul convinces Criswell to speed things up as the morning will be here soon. Shirley and Bob watching stunned from their posts as the shimmying breast shaker goes on and on.

"The princess of darkness would have you for her own to join us in extreme pain," he tells ShirleyShirley begs for their lives. Even Bob is promised. 

Bob tries to offer himself in Shirley's place, so she can escape. "No one wishes to see a man dance!' sniffs Criswell.

It's rather redundant, but: "She lived as a zombie in life; so she will remain forever a zombie in death." - Dene Starnes' dance makes the others seem almost lifelike; it consists of putting her arms straight out in front of her, lowering them, bowing, touching her hair, putting her hands back down again. her eyes seem scared and dead at the same time. The music plods and she doesn't even appear to blink. How she got the dead lifeless glaze in her eyes I don't know, but it's effective. Her eyes look like they were painted on the back of her eyelids. But they're her real eyes. Anyway, she bows. She makes a little back and forth sidestep movement. She  sort of wafts around in a circle. This, you think, instead of letting the empress have her way with Shirley! By now we're squirming in anticipation!


"The moon sinks slower in the hills," notes an anxious Black Ghoul; Criswell puts her at ease: "you shall have your pleasure, that I decree."

Bur first, the dancers continue: "This one would have died for feathers, fur and fluff... and so she did." (Rene De Beau) has nice breasts and kind of looks like Debbi Mazur. She does a lot of twirling. By then even those of us who came purely to see naked women dance have grown no doubt weary. With a few exceptions, the dancing all has a disconnected half-asleep aura, as if the music was added later. chosen at random, and the coffee was yet to arrive; and the girls--Silver and O'Brien aside--don't seem to be professionals but scared amateurs who seem to be contemplating if they should run off the set and catch the first Greyhound back to Kansas. 

"Could it be a college initiation? "

By now the disconnect between movement and music has become as vast as the ocean.  And yet, in that disconnect there is a kind of modernist thrill to be unearthed. Dyed-wool Woodsians know this. Wood didn't direct it, but he wrote it, cast Criswell, and he was there on set to hold his cue cards. Director Stephen C. Apostlof, would go on to partner with Ed on titles like The Cocktail Hostesses and Drop Out Wife), full of--as Dead2rights says-- "pasty white Californians halfheartedly pretending to hump each other in blandly-hideous bedrooms, motel rooms, and living rooms, while drowsy "beautiful music" drones on in the background"  Most of them seem lost to time. Orgy is one time Ed and Stephen got it right.  And thanks to a beautiful remastering by Vinegar Syndrome, it looks stunning, mesmerizing, inviting and ever-so radiantly ghoulish. The endless parade of half-asleep strippers are now couched in a gorgeously-lit (by Ted Mikels!) set, rich with lurid blazing colors and real 3-D depth in the swirling fog. And while most of the dancers make time seem to stand still, we can take comfort in bleary-eyed Criswell's odd commentary, the cutaway reaction shots to the buxom redhead human witness (the red of her hair and lips is insane on this new restoration), the lesbian Vampira substitute with her belated knife act, the werewolf and mummy hanging back in the bushes, The lovely fog and Gold Key comic book cover colors, the skeletons and skulls. It's all sublime. 

It gets a bit disappointing when after whining for her reward, the empress wastes too much time dancing with her knife and staring at the camera, rather than molesting Shirley. But you can't have everything. You can always pop in Jess Franco's Succubus immediately after and pretend Fawn has become magically Jeanine Reynaud and is picking up right where we left off. But that is the catch. Both Criswell and the Black Ghoul turn instantly into skeletons before she can plunge in the knife. Girl, you wasted too much time with your damned blade dance!


The perfect movie to fall asleep to, at 4 AM, perhaps the most touching element is to think how bad this used to look in cropped format with ugly colors until 2017 when the restoration and Blu-ray set came out. Looking as good as it does more than makes up for the dull stretches. As the Joseph Ziemba wrote in 2004, 13 years before VS came through: "Orgy Of The Dead is the greatest trash movie of all time... let it not rot in the vaults." So Vinegar Syndrome came through, before actual vinegar syndrome could work its catastrophic damage. Hurray for AFGA, SW, and VS, and for Bleeding Skull! And the championing of the outsider artist. Open the vaults of thy crypt the next full moon when the ghouls are once more bid to  'dance' again. As erotic as a tombstone, but ripe with eternal rewards, and enough radiance and contentment for a dozen full moonzz.

Way of the Coffin Flop: GAME OF DEATH II (1981)

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Night #6 of the 12 Days of Ed Wood

Some deaths never last.

 Acolytes of the Great Bruce Lee temple generally sneer at the legions of posthumous 'final' films of their great one, for which there as many as there are posthumous Hendrix albums. It's much easier to 'finish' a Hendrix song as one can easily add and subtract tracks to any guitar, but it's harder to make a movie out of a few smiling reaction shots and home movies. Very rarely does a film like that transcend its ghoulish aspirations to become something top drawer Plan Nine-hilarious. Well, sneer away, acolytes, but GAME OF DEATH II (1981) --one of the earlier posthumous mashups from Golden Harvest, the sequel to what was a ridiculous mash-up to begin with--is a magnificent melange for the dissociative cinenambulist, with some great fights and stunts for those who like that sort of thing, so prett queetending and wag on the jump train! 

Strangely joyous and soothing in a post-modern sort of way, it's such a strange, fractured and cool hodgepodge homage it must be taken on its own terms, and beyond them, to emerge a Godardesque demonstration of the impossibility of a completed and unified cinematic subject. 


Released a mere seven year after his death, Golden Harvest pulls out three of the stops to let us know Lee's spirit still very much present, ghostlording over a relentlessly shifting composite of doubles, dubbers, stunt-men, unused footage from other movies, dummies, and lookalike replacement 'little brothers', in a film that's half-seance, part flashback 'clips' episode, part verite funeral footage /memorial, and one half cheap-but-inventive Enter the Dragon / James Bond-emulating spy flick science fiction kung fu action movie-- all spit-taped and split-shined into the wild without a single dull moment to call its own. That's more than two halves, I know, but logic and math have no place in Game of Death II. It's not even really a sequel. All you need to know is this: it... is... the best...at what it does... and what it does... no one man can say. 

I love it enough that I hate the dumb title. I wish it was called Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave instead. There is an actual film Bruce Lee Fights Back from the Grave. It has no footage of Bruce Lee whatsoever. Can you imagine how cool it would be to have the below left poster be for this one, or to have a poster with Bruce surfing on a coffin 600 feet in the air lifted by helicopter? it's such an indelible moment in the film--one of those WTF moments bad film lovers stuff under their mattresses like tittering misers-- and yet the poster art for Game of Death II is woefully unimaginative. I shan't even post it. 

I mention all this because death and graves and coffin imagery are a huge part of Game of Death II. Billy Lo (i.e. Lee... if his full face is visible, otherwise a stand-in/double) falls to his death after mysterious claw-wielding helicopter absconds with his buddy's coffin during a big funeral, hoisting it high in the air. Bruce tries to hold onto death for dear life. Death will not have him. Now Lo/Lee's subsequent funeral--is full of actual Lee funeral footage interspersed with footage from Lee's earlier, non-kung fu, acting roles, as a child actor and young romantic lead. By then, about 1/3 of the way through the film, we're so confused over the melange dummies, stand-ins, dubbers, projections, outtakes and doubles, we don't even know who the real Lee was or is or supposed to be. It raises strange questions: What even is death? Can we live forever if we hire someone to dress like us and walk around our old neighborhood? Does the weird seductress in the poster at left really have a bat tied up in her hair like Medusa's snakes caught a flying monkey? Did Bruce fake his death in real life to avoid dealing with the triads? Were the triads trying to extort Lee into signing a long contract and he felt there was no way out other than a fake suicide? Or Did the triads whack him for not signing with them, and they successfully made it look like an accident? 

Nothing is answered in Game of Death II and that's how we want it. It starts and we're instantly in an off-footing. In his last fully alive film, Enter the Dragon, we heard Lee's real voice when he spoke --a careful, measured, sinuous purr. When Bruce speaks in Death II, his real voice is replaced by a strident, square-jawed, no nonsense hero-style voice actor, one we've heard a thousand times in other roles and who does not sound purring or Asian but like a Dragnet audition. The effect is immediately disorienting, plunging us into an uncanny sense of disconnect. But if we don't fight it, if we let the uncanny affect create a post-structural frisson, the payoff- as he splits into a whir of doubles and triples---  will be a magic carpet ride of creative Bruce posthumous representation, like a post-modern kick to the back of the head (we'll see a lot of the back of Lee's head). Everything evokes something. During the funeral we hear trumpets evoking Ennio Morricone elegies. 

If the first Game of Death was the first posthumous Jimi Hendrix album Cry of Love (i.e. Jimi's singing and playing on ever track, but tracks clearly finished by musicians Jimi never met), Game of Death II seems more a Vegas-style hologram of Hendrix in concert backed by a boozy cover band. Since it has much less Bruce footage to work with than the first Game, Part II is forced to think way outside the box. It gets so far away the box is left behind altogether. As such, I love it like a mother loves the bottom rung of her drug stash, or the writers at Bleeding Skull! love Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember. In other words, a lot. 


PLOT

The story begins with Lee walking the garden of his kung fu school's massive temple, talking to someone offscreen, not the orange-robed older monk he was talking to in Enter the Dragon, but a fellow badass named Chin Lu (Hwang Jang-lee, whose long black facial hair and ponytail decorated many a Golden Harvest kung fu villain). Chin--in a flowing gold robe--pauses their talk to decimate an Anglo challenger with his peerless sword technique while Lee watches and drinks tea. Afterwards, Lu notes they both have been receiving an unusual amount of challenges ("Someone may want us dead"). Lee narrates a flashback to a midnight (i.e. so it can be too dark to see faces clearly), greenhouse rendezvous he had with a young upstart some weeks earlier and we get our first composite restructured Lee: most of the time it's a fight double (lots of back of the head shots) plus what looks like an image of Lee from Game of Death I projected onto one of the plastic sheeted walls. The double keeps his mouth hanging open throughout so that dialogue can be attributed to him at any time. "That's what we call control!" he shouts at his whiny challenger after a pointed beatdown, "something you wouldn't understand!" We can't imagine the real Lee ever getting pissy like that after beating an opponent in a fair challenge, but it's not Lee's voice, and it's not him fighting, and its someone else's back of the head, so there you go. The fight still has lots of stillness and lightning quick moves and there's a great bit of Dolby foley work with a breaking clay pot mixed in there (on my 2004 Dragon Dynasty disc) it sounded like it was coming from my kitchen! 

Even in the narrative, doubling, flashbacks and mistakes commingle as if trying to confuse even the most astute of viewers as to whether the guy they're watching is supposed to be the actual Bruce Lee in flashback, or hischaracter Billy Lo (who alternates between old Lee clips and his back-of-the-head double), or his college student pornography-owning, flaking-out-on-his-training brother Bobby. Whatever the truth, I don't care. The laconic nature of the first half, with its laid-back clip show aimlessness mixed with fights and and family matters leads to a mellow glow that carries through the rest of the film  ("Don't worry father, I won't let it bother me") which becomes a fun, ultra-goofy spin on Enter the Dragon's midnight black suit secret agent basement lair skulkfest, i.e. the best part of that film. 

But first! Billy learns his friend Chin Lu has been killed! He goes to tell Lu's sister, plunging the movies into the nighttime world of 'the Ginza.' We get a very Japanese rock/pop singer song of the moment (is it Meiko Kaji?) as Lo threads his way through the stock footage streets to find the nightclub where she works. Underdressed waitresses dare to wear bunny ears, and everyone watches glumly from their tables as if it's the 100th take of the night. Even with all that torpor, a fight erupts in her dressing room; someone helpfully kicks out the lightbulb so a double can be used for most of the shots. Our hero goes running through the streets which resemble a kind of sad indoor mall. 

Next up, Lee/Lo goes to visit his own sibling, a kid brother named Bobby (Tae-jeong Kim) at college, wasting his time with pornography and non-martial arts studies. We see hands reading an erotic Chinese book then throwing it in the trash. They are Lee's, he is at his kid brother Bobby's apartment or house or garage. He throws all his brother's dirty magazines into the trash basket, and then starts penning a letter :

"Dear Bobby - how are you? I was hoping to see you but you were out; sorry I missed you. I guess I don't have to tell you that to become an expert in kung fu requires more effort." 

Lo/Lee leaves him his bro the family's secret boxing manual as if knowing he's about to die. A very Ennio Morricone rip with a blazing brass section and male vocalizing heralds a visit to a fancy pagoda for Lu's funeral, where marital arts trainees in black, like an army of Japanese Lee replacements waiting to go, stand motionless along all the sides of the walkway, in case their needed to jump into action. 

The funeral is with Shinto Buddhist touches. Astute viewers realize instantly Lu's not really dead when four muscly guys in white won't let Lo get close enough to view the body. Lo runs into a Japanese guy and we see the swastika (in the right direction) on the casket, realizing in the process that Buddhism is so much more cosmic than Christianity. The art shows a much clearer understanding of universal energy flows, the circular breathing of the monks echoes eternity, and when a helicopter comes to steal the casket the circuit is complete. 

Lee/Lo is so adamant at getting a look at the body, he hitches a ride grabbing onto the claws on the the casket, only to drop down and fall to his death from hundreds of feet in the air. And lo, Billy Lo is dead! But also-- the real Bruce Lee is dead!! Now we get Lee's real funeral with overlays of his whole career, from child actor onwards, a whole photo album is overlaid with footage of his funeral ceremony. 

Well if you got to go, the best way is to do it while falling off of a coffin claw from three hundred feet.  "After you've read this letter, go to Japan," reads dad's letter to young Bobby, "and avenge your brother, Billy." 

Bobby visits a wealthy white guy named Lewis (he looks a little like Daniel Day Lewis - coincidence?) who eats raw meat and drinks a red milky pink cocktail for breakfast. ("This is raw venison, and deer's blood!") He gives Bobby a tour of the grounds, interrupting the tour to fight to the death three idiot martial artists who show up at the gate to challenge him. It's funny that Lewis, the only white guy in the whole film, is the worst dubbed, with a voice all halting and unevenly accenting the wrong words, as he shows off his grounds ("I keep a lot of specially trained.... peacocks... over there. They obey my command. It takes a lot of training.") When Sherman makes a signal and a whole flock of peacocks fly out of their aerie, across the vast lawn and right towards the camera! It's just one of the unique sights on hand that you won't find in any other movie. We also see lions just hanging out in the garden; Bobby notes that "they are really big lions. I'm kind of frightened." We get quite a bit of the lion footage; they surround the jeep "their favorite dish is fresh human meat").   

Bobby sleeps over at Lewis's estate and is visited first by an under-clothed Anglo lady named Angel (Miranda Austin) who tries to first mate with, and then kill, Bobby. Did Lewis send him or someone else? A guy in a convincing lion suit, acting like a lion (he may or may not be supposed to be an actual lion -we never quite know) comes flying through the window next. Wait was he supposed to be a lion or a guy in a lion suit? We've seen less convincing lion suits that were supposed to be actual lions. It's not Lewis sending these hit women and animals. There's also someone trying to kill Lewis, too: someone wearing a crazy red mask. Lewis may be the guilty one who ordered Billy's death, but Bobby still fights the guy trying to kill him, whom he encounters while they're both skulking around the grounds in the dead of night (Bobby wearing the iconic black catsuit Bruce Lee wore when sneaking around the island at night in Enter the Dragon), leading to a nice day-for-night fight in the garden.


Clues finally lead to the "Tower of Death" but the secret is - the tower is in reverse!! That's not what a tower is called, man! It's called a pit. But there you go. An elevator takes Bobby down down to a trap-rigged lair, a very cool combination of James Bond super villain lair, a 1960s TV Batman cliffhanger death trap and Han's underground opium processing plant in Enter the Dragon. Rivers of red blood (or some kind of red liquid) flank a grey industrial sci-fi room with ridged booby trap-laden hallways. Instead of Dragon's hall of mirrors we get the spinning throw room; an electrified grid of colored lasers fries his stick when he pokes it in, and so he must throw a rope so well it anchors between long boxes of tinsel and wrapping paper! I think (that's what I saw anyway).

Luckily before Bobby can be fried, the bad guy leaps from out of his coffin onto a pedestal where the off switch can be easily accessed. A bit of the theme song from Enter is shoved into the faux-Morricone grandeur, and the film ends on a freeze frame. Blammo! No coffin can hold Lu, I mean Lo!  I man LEE!

Deadpan before Death! 


Hair of the Dogmatizer: THE BRAINIAC (1962)

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Night 13 of The 12 Days of Ed Wood:

I tried to watch the first episode HBO pandemic anxiety drama Station 11 last night and ended up locked in the bathroom, breathing erratically, trying not die from worrying about dying. There needs to be new warning in addition to strobe lights, sexual assault, drug use, etc, and that as 'vividly reproduced panic attacks" I.e. in. sound mixing and acting, camera movement and music all triggering a reflexive panic attack entrainment from susceptible viewers. I suddenly remembered the feeling that I had when I ran home from work with a bag full of dried beans and rice, early in the pandemic, thoroughly convinced the world was about to end and stores would be closed, riots and corpses galore, and civilization toppled within weeks. I'd forgotten in the interim, that anxiety, until the first episode of Station 11 reproduced it so well it was like I was Vertigo-ing like Jimmy Stewart looking down from Midge's step ladder, and we realizing along with himself that he never really got rescued off that ledge at the beginning of the film, did he? He's still up there, hanging. 

We may have forgotten, since Zoom, online delivery apps, and Amazon happened to be waiting conveniently right there to keep us from toppling, but we're still up there on the ledge, hanging, clutching by our fingernails over the harrowing void. 

That's where the glory of bad movies come in. For those of us so easily suggestible, those of who lose our shit just thinking about losing our shit, those of us easily triggered by the anxieties of our age, watching our nightmares collapse in a tumble of cheap mummery provides a warm comforting gush of relief. We can breathe between the cracks again; we can latch onto doddering Frank Morgan's lapel and watch that big green face bellowing smoke from behind the safety of his chintz curtain. 

Lucky for me, and maybe you, that undrawn Ed Wood outsider bizarro spirit lives in crevasses the world over, the equivalent of a "I do believe in spooks / I do believe in spooks" holy mantra. I'm finding new protective totems ever year, the world 'round. One I always knew about but never really fully embraced for its full anxiety-abating lunacy until lately: The Brainiac (the Mexican title: El Baron del Terror). It's this movie I turned to once the first Station 11 episode finally ended. And lo, it healed me. This 1962 gem from producer / star Abel Salazar, exists in a world far stranger than even other Mexican horror movies of time. It's unique unto itself. Intrigued? finish your pulque and come along with me down the rabbit hole of time and space to....

THE BRAINIAC
(1962) Dir. Chano Ureta 
*/****

Actor Abel Salazar produced a web of 'great' weird and wondrous early-60s horror (and other) films in Mexico, but THE BRAINIAC (1962) is the only one that can be rightly placed next to the works of Bunuel and Jodorowsky in the zebra and xylophone-stuffed canals of Mexican cinematic surreality. Salazar himself--a kind of Mexican version of Sheldon Leonard--takes the title role and makes all the pretty girls kiss him (like Eric Schaffer or Paul Naschy after him) as the irresistible Baron Vitelius d'Estera. Tried by a hooded tribunal for "dogmatizing" and seduction, he has nothing but a baleful stare and a lone friend's plea (rewarded with 50 lashes) for rebuttal. Tied to a big X, made pants-less in a pope hat, he glares as the inquisitors read their verdicts (and the ladies roll their eyes). After cursing his condemners out by name (seeing right through their black hoods), our saucy Baron hitches a ride on a passing comet. Three hundred years later, the comet returns and the baron drops out of the sky with a thud, right near an observatory where the chief astronomer exclaims "comets can't just disappear!" 

The plot itself is sparse and expects us to fill in a lot of blanks from other late-50s sci-fi films it presumes we've seen. There is no need to explain why the baron has returned a suction cup clawed, long-tongued, patchy-haired pointy nosed, brain-sucking alien shapeshifter, because similar things happened to the viajeros in a bunch of late-50s sci-fi hits probably seen by writers Frederico Curiel and Adolfo López Portill: First Man into Space (1959), Night of the Blood Beast (1958), and The Creeping Unknown (1955) all feature similar situations. By 1961, merging with a vampiric space 'other' was as familiar as the "bends" or oxygen narcosis. On the Gothic horror side, Brainiac's plot leans on Bava's Black Sunday (for its witch burning prologue and descendant cursing) and of course, for a fusion of the two, there is Edgar Ulmer's Man from Planet X (for the weird noir-ish observatory / fog machine-and-rear projection soundstage noir isolation and omnipresent darkness. Lastly, for the 'back from the great beyond to wreak vengeance on those who sentenced me to death, one-by-one' plots we have everything from that spate of late-30s/early-40s Karloff vehicles, like The Man They Could Not Hang, Before I Hang, Black Friday, and The Walking Dead and even Son of Frankenstein. Somewhere or other they learn the baron can jump to a different body if not destroyed by fire, so when they finally close in, both detectives have comically large flame-throwers. 

In one thing though, The Brainiac is utterly unique, and that's where it counts: with his weird two fingered suction cup claw hands, his long forked tongue; his scattered tufts of hair, the weird hatchet-like planes of his face, the crudeness of his sculpted features, giant plastered-on fangs and pointy nose and ears, the baron is one charming monster, clearly just a big latex (?) mask replete with closed mouth and bulging eyes (I'm guessing the actor looks through the nostrils), he's totally disarming in his ridiculous cheap cuddliness. Somewhere between the Fly, the  Devil Bat, and an anteater. He keeps his uneaten brains in a jar inside a locked desk, and takes periodic hits from it as needed. If he's in his Salazar form he uses a long spoon. If not, his long, phallic tongue. Best of all, part of his vengeance package seems to always involve the baron hypnotizing the man and forcing him to watch as he makes out with his wife or daughter. And then, after a few seconds, becoming the monster and sucking the brains of them both, then burning the place down.

In its narrative economy too, comes a blissful expunging of all the more tiresome plot points and establishing shots of lesser films. Like the best of the early-60s/late-50s Mexican horror films from Salazar's team, there are no exterior shots, no daytime stock footage 'next morning' inserts to dull the eerie dislocated nocturnal vibe; no plucky girl reporters or comical bumpkins (the latter one of Mexican horror cinema's least crossover-able elements); no children, no animals in cages, and no tired priests. Very few cast members at all - just a pair of detectives, the coroner, the baron, his butler, his victims, and the hero couple (the hero Ronny being a descendent of the baron's one friend who stood up for him). 

It's the little details too that once considered logically make the whole thing patently ridiculous, as if a narrative told and conceived by a breathless child trying to describe a comic book. Cause and effect barely know each other in this alternated world of stressed-out astronomers (he acts like the comet has his car keys) calves brain-eating, flame thrower-waving homicide detectives ("keep the parts separate," one advises tells the team cleaning up a double homicide, "otherwise I might get mixed up!"), a coroner ("Just look at these two orifices!") and a weird direct lineage family tree situation; every one of his would-be executioners has exactly one descendent who looks just like them (except for one girl, leading to a one of the many wow but sublimely deadpan moments). All the members of his tribunal are even conveniently buried together in one old mausoleum, so the cop can save time reading their names. They don't seem to have much of an existence outside of this one moment, nor does Mexico itself. The old records of his trial which he's somehow memorized and which are just lying around like an old phone book. The baron knows the charges by heart: accused of "dogmatizing, using conjuring for evil ends that all men are attracted to, and seducing young maidens that couldn't... couldn't resist!" 

Lastly, cementing its classic status is a kind of strange lonesome interiority that in its sparsely attended notcural scenes evokes a kind of Edward Hopper noir fatality both chilling and comforting. The baron kills so many people that when he tells the inquisitive cops to send his sympathy to their loved ones, the detective says, "it's impossible, there's no one left to feel sorry for now." The sets seem to breathe in deeply in relief or fear, as the backgrounds of scenes empty from the one or two extras that were loitering in the corners just scenes before. When the baron first meets Ronny and his fiancee outside the observatory he instantly bonds with them over astronomy. Later when the pair come to visit (it turns out his fiancee is his last intended victim), they remember their meeting, and the baron says "we became friend then, did we not?" One longs for and recalls those easy days when friends were made that fast, over that little. There's the baron's first night in town, drifting into a closing, empty bar, with one guy sweeping up, another counting the till, the lonely girl at the bar drinking her isolation away who welcomes him without question. 

This Mexico, all wrapped up in its emptied interior loneliness and modern, flat (rear projection backdrops being still photographs) is just waiting for something like the baron's grand Gothic reception hall, clearly left over from some bigger budgeted-production-- landing like some chimera from Universal's classic horror past, manifesting in the midst of modern day poverty row police procedural nightscape of sullen autopsy rooms, cafes with the morning newspapers filling us in on the previous night's victims of our brain-draining arsonist. They all immediately accept random invitations to the baron's mansion, as if just waiting for the cool new kid to kickstart their social lives. Yet they have no clear idea what to do there: all are introduced by the butler, grab a drink and mill around, then turn around and say good-night minutes later. Now the baron has earned the right to come visit all the other couples, where he can kill at his leisure. Indeed, there are no family ties of any kind attached to any one, only sexy wives, daughters and bug-eyed men soon to be de-brained. At the wedding of one of the couples the baron is the only one in attendance (he shows up late, is why, and meets them at the church foyer). In sum, this is a very strange reality: there are only ever the characters we see. Nothing exists beyond the camera's proscenium arch, giving it all a beguiling interiority and feverish dream logic. Somewhere in there, the baron even falls in love with Ronny's fiancee, though there's no indication or connection until the climax. He must kill her though, since she's a descendant: "My hate is much stronger than my love, like a master no one can control!" He goes on and on: "Why did destiny elect you! ? Why? I want to know!" She faces away from him as he says all these things; like she doesn't want her husband to know about how much reciprocal desire feels, like it's all just the usual Besos y Lagrimas-style suds.  And as soon as the baron is vaporized, the film ends - without even a shot of the reunited lovers heading off into the sunrise. For what these characters don't seem to know is, without the baron's presence, none of them are destined to survive 'the End.' 

And just like that, it's over. We kind of have to wake up. The rest of Station 11 and all those terrifying vertigo end of the world global warming too fast Covid leaky ceiling work woes and age and death horrors still waiting to pounce and send you hyperventilating to the bathroom to splash cold water on the back of your neck and remember you mantras. But don't worry. There are miracles of our modern age. We may all be isolated in our cribs, the world coming us to digitized without even the warmth of a funeral pyre as comfort, but movies like The Brainiac aren't going anywhere. In fact, we can take them with us on our phones, like some kind of weird twilight rosary, or a passing comet, ready to whisk us out of the pyre.

Cozzi takes the Cake: THE BLACK CAT (1989) aka Demons 6: De Profundis

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Night 55 of Acidemic's 12 Days of Ed Wood

Cozzi's/Coates' CAT hath cometh to Blu-ray last year, and you gotta see it! It's not your grandparent's Black Cat (with Karloff) it's not your drunk uncle's 941 Black Cat (with Broderick Crawford), it's not even your weird cousin's 1983 Black Cat (with Patrick Magee's hairy eyebrows menacing Mimsy Farmer). No, this is the 1989 Black Cat, aka Demons 6: Des Profundis (with everything exploding all the time), directed by Lewis Coates, aka Luigi Cozzi, aka "The Italian Ed Wood," and it's all ours. 5-eva.

Now, some people, maybe even Cozzi himself, think being Cozzi being called "the Italian Ed Wood" is an insult. They're 100 proof wrong! Like Wood's, Cozzi's best films brim with pagan innocence of narrative structure that results in giddy freedom from expectation. Both display a palpable rapture for classic horror and sci-fi blissfully at odds with the usual Robert McKee three act structurezz and character arc-ingzzz. Instead, everything is alive from minute to minute with the sort of giddy possibility usually weened out of civilized adults by the time they finish high school, the kind of alive rapture we once got hearing our parents read us our favorite books before bedtime. That's why Plan Nine is a beloved cult treasure watched over and over, while The Day the Earth Stood Still is just a respected as a well-crafted liberal message movie even die hard sci-fi fans see maybe once or twice. I don't turn to my DVD collection for a feel bad-lecture about nuclear responsibility from dull paternal Michael Rennie. I turn to my DVD collection to hear Dudley Manlove rant about "Solarmanite" and our "stupid minds!" I'd rather a movie try and fail at 'passing' as a mainstream /normal film but succeed at being niche/surreal rather than the other way around, the major studios trying to make psychedelic movies in the late-60s kind of way. Nothing drains the joy out of a project like groupthink and big budget competence. Wood hypothesizes it. Cozzi proves it.  

Cozzi's career may have been winding down a bit by 1989, as indeed was the drive-in era of Italian cinema as a whole, but before the 90s could begin in earnest, Cozzi gave us two parting gifts. One was Paganini Horror, it's a-nice, but the other is Black Cat, and it's a bona fide back row meta-classic. 

Initially conceived of a "Three Mothers" entry by its writer and intended star Daria Nicolodi (Dario Argento's ex-wife, she co-wrote/created Suspiria and Inferno, see Woman is the Father of Horror), Cozzi  worried about displeasing almighty Dario so refracted the story to a kind of  alternate reality meta-sequel, somewhere between Targets and the Freddy's New Nightmare rather than a straight up Mother movie. This pissed off Daria, so she split the project. Yet on it went, finally erupting like a last gasp of primo 80s Italian supernatural horror/sci-fi to god knows where. The point is, get over the total weird disjointed aspects and the terrible dubbing and man does it rock, howl and rattle.


The story involves Italian horror power couple, director Marc (Urbano Barberini) and star Anne (Florence Guérin) and their young baby--no doubt loosely based on Argento and Nicolodi themselves--planning a movie about a witch named Levana. Marc and Anne are tight friends with screenwriter Dan (Maurizio Fardo) and his actress wife Nora (Caroline Munro). There's also Michele Soavi as the director of the movie the women are currently working on (something to do with guns and 80s sunglasses) and Brett (Return of the Fly) Halsey as a Satanic, wheelchair-bound producer named Leonard Levin who Marc and Dan have to pitch the Lavana story too. He vows he'll "create such excitement over this project that the major distributors will be cutting each other's throats to get a piece!" He sends them off to a psychic (Karina Hoff) who busts out her big apparently hand-written volume of Suspiria de Profundis ("not a work of fiction!" she exclaims as the Goblin Suspiria music cue briefly plays in the background). The psychic encourages Marc to change the character's name to something else. For there really was a witch named Levana, alive for centuries and she is waiting to be reborn. Just saying her name can wake her up. They don't believe her of course, maybe Levana has already manifested in their psyches.

As in Michele Soavi's Stagefright, we're in a world where the meta and the intertextual are woven in the fabric of the narrative in a way far more deadpan and subliminal than perhaps might be discernible on first (non-DMX-enhanced) viewings. I remember catching this out of curiosity 10 years or so ago, when Netflix still had lots of weird old movies on their streaming service. It seemed kind of disjointed and needlessly gross with all the bursting green food coloring postules  (ala Dèmoni) on the witch's face in lurid close-up, the terrible dubbing and fractured artsy style, but there was no getting around how unique and ambiguous it was. Over the years that uniqueness and abiguity has come to mean an awful lot.  

Yeah, the pustules. Validating the psychic's warning, we occasionally fade into a gross fleshy strand-covered fetus rising from its amber liquid interstellar/ transdimensional grave, maybe on the moon, (no doubt meant as a kind of reverse-evil star child from 2001: A Space Odyssey). Meanwhile, an adult Levana--her face and hands are grotesque pustules--begins to take over the mind of Anne, urging her to kill her own child!  Just how far will Anne go to get into character?

What makes the movie such a blast is that Levana starts bending reality and the minds of all who think of her almost from the get go, including Nora, Dan, and Marc. The only question: is this the movie's reality - in all its weirdness - or the dream's reality in which Anne finds herself plunged? 

As in most of his work, Cozzi's love of strong, cool women characters shines through in a way unique to Italian cinema (the only similar figure in the US is probably Roger Corman). There's usually at least one female villain in his films, as well as a strong heroine, and a string of strong cool female characters in between. Yet in the Levana script Marc and Dan are writing, there's only one woman character in the entire film and she's a pustule-covered witch! (Dan's affirmation that she's "very strong" seems like a back-handed condescension) This sets up a rivalry between Nora and Anne for the part, though one wonders why on earth would either woman would want so desperately to play a part where they're covered in pustules, and why can't Marc and his writer create two female spots for their own actress wives? But, as per Cozzi, of all the women in the film, none are objectified; they're resourceful and strong, never victims. In other words, it's a strange and cryptic anti-patriarchal judgment made as far from the mire of true misogyny as any 1980s Italian horror movie or indeed the world could reach.  This is such a female-centric movie that when some guy who's arc was no doubt lost on the cutting room floor shows up, his presence seems very odd, shows up and gets in Caroline Munroe's car to go visit Lavana. He's dead before he even gets off a single line! 

Other female cast members include Luisa Manieri is the babysitter, who asks to bring her cousin along on one of her babysitting jobs. In one of the creepiest scenes, Anne comes home to find a young boy playing with her baby, only to learn the babysitter's cousin didn't come along. WHO IS THAT BOY? She runs up and he's gone! She goes into the other room where the fridge, that was supposed to have been fixed, is now overheating. The receipt from the repairman is GONE! She flashes back to a messy fridge. Is she losing her damned mind or is someone gaslighting her? It's a great stretch of weirdness but before any of those questions can be answered - BAM! A car comes smashing through a wall or the TV turns on by itself. A child is onscreen, calling her by name. Warning her about Levana:  "If she takes the body of a young woman born under the sign of the sixth moon there will be no way on earth to stop her!" 

The normal progression for these kinds of things--as the set up leads us to believe--involves dream sequences, red herrings and 'gaslit moms walking around their big houses alone, hearing noises and watching strange new gardeners through the curtains' - the sort of hackneyed styff that would eat up a whole hour of a TV movie by Dan Curtis or Curtis Harrington.  Cozzi has no patience for slow builds. He crashes a car through the wall like a ten year-old, utterly derailing the movie already in our heads, freeing us from the familiar linear shackles. So before Anne can be taken to a shrink and told it's all in her head as Marc gives her part away "for her own good," and all that nonsense, we're plunging heedlessly into lunatic dreamtime, ever father and deeper, with exploding intestines erupting from TVs, weird colored lighting, an inner child filling Anne in on plot points; Anne dressing up like Levana and trying to stab her own baby; Anne actually stabbing Marc (or did she?) and fending off curvy dagger attacks by Levin's sultry personal assistant.She has to warn Marc! If he's not dead, or in bed with Nora. The baby is gone! And as this is an Italian horror movie, there's no guarantee of the child's safety.

Here nightmare/dreams are so indistinguishable from reality it doesn't feel like a cheat as some nightmare scenes do; there's no waking up in the dead of night screaming, no being told it was just a dream. Cozzi knows that in a movie everything is already a dream, he owes us nothing as far as 'bringing it back to reality' - he laughs at that hack pedestrian need for a normal reality through line, the type with investigating cops and patriarchal shrinks. He knows we're sick of all that stuff. So as Marc lies dead in the dream she hears herself in the distance telling Marc about the dream she had where she kills him. But then car comes crashing through the living room and the bloody Dan emerges. Bang Boom

And for the fans, there are callbacks to all Cozzi's best: a bladder burst stomach effect evokesContamination; Munro's presence evokes Starcrash; we see leftover moon shots he stole from Hercules; an inner child appearing in the TV is dubbed by the same child actress who plays the spirit guides in Hercules 2, and so on.

As is true of Cozzi's entire oeuvre, even the domestic tranquility scenes have a strange uncanny edge, the few that there are. Things move too fast to mark down. You just know that if a bunch of maggots aren't superimposed over Lavana's pustule-covered face, then the TV must be about to explode with buckets of green slime, a bunch of intestines, and Lavana's knife. "Pick up the knife and become Lavana, or leave it and stay as you are!" Guess which choice Ann makes!

As for the music, well, even if it's not Goblin or Ennio Morricone, Vince Tempera's 'shoot for bodacious, settle for bemusing' score is certainly better than Keith Emerson's clueless melange in Argento's own Suspiria follow-up, Inferno. By 1989 Argento was himself falling into disrepair as far as music tastes, leaning towards half-baked metal and instantly-dated prog rock. Tempera keeps it all humming without trying to turn anything into a music video, and that's good enough for me. 

If Cozzi's films have an Achilles' heel, it's always the English dubbing. Sometimes, if the budget allows, as with his his Hercules movies or Contamination, it's pretty good. But here and in the same year's Paganini Horror (1989) it's not so good. Worse, the one place where Nicolodi's absence is really felt is in Levana's voice. Setting the benchmark for super creepy voices with her guttural croak as Helena Markos ("you are going to die now!") in Suspiria (if you doubt it's Daria doing that laugh, just dig her throaty, evil laugh in Property is No Longer a Theft), Nicolodi would surely have nailed Levana. Instead, the actress used for Lavana's voice sounds pitch-shifted and forced. Lines like "I won't rest until I force your heart beyond the brink of madness! Hahahah" - sounds kind of like a hammy drag queen's failed audition for a Disney haunted house ride. 

In the end though, Cozzi doesn't give us any time to complain - things zip along so fast and incredible we can only hold on for dear life. Never afraid to go wide and Jack Kirby-cosmic, Cozzi starts out with a meta tale of an Argento-like household being swept over by a witch and then broadens the aperture to include time travel, cosmic balance, and fairy tale Jungian bedazzlement. When a film's this great, who cares if it's kind of terrible? Anyway, it's over too fast to not want to ride it again. 

Noisemakers: NABONGA! (1944) , BOWANGA, BOWANGA (1951), EEGAH! (1962)

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12 Days of Ed Wood, Night 8

Like everyone, I have a soft spot for old crappy, stock footage-jammed jungle movies from the 30s-40s (and sometimes 50s) but---as befitting the times--with a caravan of caveats: no children (that means you, "Boy"); no caged animals; no wasting time with excessive frolicking chimps (especially ones confusingly named "Cheetah"); no prey-favoritism (i.e. "Boy" rescuing antelopes from starving leopards); and above all no race-favoritism (Jane making Tarzan protect obviously bad white guys from indignant natives and/or disgruntled animals). I also dislike when a film wastes too much time on montages indicating a long boring trek through jungle heat, and arguments with suspicious native porters. Oh and I hate the ones filmed in color, unless the color is really well restored. I'm also not a big fan of Johnny Weismuller, truth be told and that dumbstruck blankness I see in his eyes. So what's left? 

Plenty, as it turns out, I love white women living as savage goddesses; the meta-clever practice of mixing new actor footage with older jungle stock footage; crocodiles (with alligators discreetly thrown in), real snakes and rubber snakes dangling limply from threes; witch doctors wearing goofy Egyptian-style hats, and cool native idols with jewels in the center of their foreheads...

And guys in gorilla suits! 

(PS - The reviews below all contain Spoilers, unusual for me, must be all the Forgotten Horrors volumes I've been reading lately. )

NABONGA!
Aka Gorilla!
(1944) Dir. Sam Newfield
*/***

Firs thing that strikes me with the potted frond PRC jungle "thriller" Nabonga is the quiet. There's almost no music at all, just the the sounds of the jungle ever present but low in the mix: distant howls of gorillas and lions, the calls of birds, and whatever else happens along, all low and mellow in the mix as if we're safe in the cool of the reptile house during a hot trip to the zoo. Maybe that's the reason I'm such a fan of this terrible movie? I taped a truncated version long ago as a kid in the very early-80s, off a PBS show called Matinee at the Bijou, so maybe I'm biased. My brother and I watched it every night for months.

The story opens with a small plan caught in a storm over the Congo: an embezzler, the loot, and his young daughter, going down. You can guess the rest. They crash. Little Doreen nurses a shot-up gorilla back to health and it becomes her protector after her father dies. The girl will grow up to be Julie London. The gorilla (Ray "Crash" Corrigan), who her evil embezzler dad dubs Samson, will make sure his stolen jewel fortune stays hers and that Samson kills anyone who comes looking for it. 

Flash forward ten years or so; there are tales of the "white witch" who lives in a "house with wings" in the interior, a rumor which will catch the ear of the Gorman (Buster Crabbe) the grown son of the disgraced financier who was jailed for Doreen's dad's crime. Gorman's interest catches the notice of a beady-eyed crook Carl (Barton MacLane) and his shady French partner Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay - right). Much skulking and fighting, shooting at dangerous animal stock footage, wrestling with alligator stock footage, and pointing at playful animal stock footage ensues, contrasted with  Doreen clad in a sarong (made from the airplane's curtains?), absently eating an apple, playing with a monkey, or putting parrots on branches, all while Samson keeps passing predators at bay. 

One strike for me is that everyone is glazed over in sweat most of the time, especially shirtless Togo, the native guide Gorman rescues from various fates; Mimi is the second worst, dripping under her pith helmet with mom shorts and clunky holster. But not our Doreen, just a sarong and a flower in her hair, sulkily mad--once they finally meet-- that Gorman doesn't want to sleep in the cave with her. But even if Samson weren't listening right outside, fixing to bounce Gorman around the set the minute he touches her, Gorman's natural censor-mandated shyness would keep him pure.

I wouldn't even be writing about this if that's all Nabonga had to offer, but London and Crabbe also benefits from an almost Lake-Ladd Glass Key chemistry.  Though he tries to convince her to fork over the jewels, she brushes off his manly ultimatums without even getting mad. With her pleasingly nasal rasp voice and sleepy-eyed 'Carol Lombard on half-quaalude' delivery of offhand lines like "Father always wanted Samson to kill people" she chills the blood slightly, in a good way; one can certainly envision her future success as the world weary chanteuse of "Cry Me a River' fame. She's supposed to be a gamin, but she's way more solid. 

 Crabbe's main strength has always been a muted good cheer, but in Nabonga he doesn't have time do dilly-dally, so he's both a prick about wanting the jewels and nervous over Samson's chaperone-like looming.  Meanwhile his first world privilege keeps showing, as in demanding Doreen "do something!" to rescue a snooping Marie once she's set upon by the overprotective Samson. I love that she just ignores him!

Not killed after all, Marie convinces Gorman to trap Samson in a cage to free up "his" access to the jewels. It all leads to double crosses and a long fistfight. Naturally evil Carl lives just long enough to plug the poor ape a bunch of times, before getting what looks like his arm ripped off (the gore hidden behind some bushes), leaving everyone safely dead but Gorman and Doreen, the latter now all out of options other than coming back with him and helping him "right a great wrong". It's a pretty tidy resolution (wasn't Gorman supposed to be shot?) but what are you going to do to in a film that runs naught but a tidy Newfield-hour?  There's not even time for a kiss at the end. Instead, the final scene is spent mourning the mighty Samson. Safely dead, he's an honored saint. Gorman says of her impending life as a penniless ward of modern civilization, "I'm sure you'll be very happy." We get the impression she'll be as happy as he is, i.e. not much. All her animal friends are dead or will be left behind, and she'll have to get a job, or a husband (it might or might not be Gorman but without the Samson /Brian Donlevy character to keep them apart, how will they ever get really together? 

PS- when I did a search for "Nabonga" on Definitons.net. The top result asked: "Did you actually mean napping or numbness?" 

The reptile house strikes again!

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BOWANGA, BOWANGA
(AKAWild Women)
(1951) Dir. Norman Dawn
**/***

The most important thing to remember about Bowanga, Bowanga (aka Wild Women), a tale of male explorers finding an all-white female tribe in "Africa," is that it is not Wild Women of Wongo (1959) nor Prehistoric Women (1950) nor the 1952 Untamed Women (though Untamed Women is another title Bowanga sometimes goes by). Those three (lesser) films are marred by an irritatingly smug aura of 50s male entitlement and 'patriarchy restored!' endings. Bowanga on the other hand is  genuinely subversive, a refreshing saga of reverse sexism that plays it more or less dead straight. A better title would have been "the White Sirens of Africa," which is how these women are referred to (or 'The Ulama' by the frightened natives). As far as I know Bowanga Bowanga is a meaningless phrase unless it has some dirty connotation to the 50s raincoat crowd. But whaddaya gonna do?

The key thing that makes it all work is the deadpan approach. The library score treats it all as a serious jungle thriller in that time-honored safari-stock-footage-packed B-movie tradition. We're treated to pleasing black-and-white Bronson Canyon and shoreline scenery that syncs well with stock footage of frolicking orangutans, patient leopards watching from tree branches, and--to add to the post-structural confusion--North American groundhogs, owls and a moose. The believably Amazon (i.e. big and tall), sexually aggressive white sirens are, once found, portrayed as both ennobled and empowered by their self-government. Only one of their tribe wants to go off with the men at the end, because she falls in love. The rest stay as they are, unconquered. Best of all, these women laugh at the men's feeble attempts to be tough. As the queen, intimidating Dana Broccoli talks like a drunk lisping Zsa Zsa Gabor. When the handsome alpha male threatens to use "force" to resist her plan to sacrifice the other two men to the fire god, she just bats him effortlessly to the ground, laughing "haha no force!" In order to spare himself by proving his 'stwong' status, one of the non-alpha men engages in the best girl vs. Amazon fight to the death since the one between John Terlesky and Gorgo (Deanna Boher) in Deathstalker 2 (1987), no faint praise.

Another reason Bowanga works: the men. The men in Perhistoric Women and Wongo are all dumb handsome or comic relief jokers just waiting to either usurp the power dynamic and restore 'nature's way' of patriarchal dominance. The men in Bowanga on the other hand are are in legit trouble. They include handsome hero Trent (Lewis Wilson), a comic relief Italian called Count Sparafucile (Don Orlando), whose much less annoying than the usual comic relief on these expeditions (he sings opera!), and Kirby (Mort Thompson), who they find dying of hunger and thirst out on the plains. As usual with these films, when you find a wounded or parched survivor in the jungle, he tells you his story via a flashback of silent jungle serial stock footage (it is the law!), which in this case involves a boy (dressed like Huck Finn) and two native girls hiding inside a cabin while a giant python and leopard alternately try to kill them and each other. Somehow this leads us straight into the pointed spears of the Ulama.

These men, first ga-ga-ing over the white sirens story then  then seeking to escape once they're successful and realize the sirens, i.e. "the Ulama," aren't the pushovers they thought. Taking them prisoner one at a time, the Ulama plan to marry the alpha male lead to the queen, and to sacrifice the other two to their fire god (it is "jungle" law!). During a tribal music making celebration replete with blonde drummers, a girl in a furry-tailed bikini does a kind mad semi-stripper shimmy (top). We also see the girls hunt (i.e. interlock with gazelle stock footage), sing by the fire, eat watermelon, spit the seeds out, and bathe by a lovely waterfall (i.e. they bathe in back yard pond intercut with waterfall footage). 

There are some movies like this where you can feel the resentment and seething distrust emanating from the half-naked girls over being gazed at, hampering the idea that they are a strong bunch of Amazons. This is perhaps a result of some groping director or verbally abusive producer making the shoot a chore, eager to put the women in 'their place' lest the powerful women they play give them the 'wrong' ideas. But then there are movies where the filmmakers seem to genuinely love strong women, and the actresses playing them seem to be having a grand time, neither taking it so seriously it becomes a downer (like the 1967 Prehistoric Women) nor playing it so broadly it becomes camp the (i.e, the 1950 Prehistoric Women). The girls in Bowanga do it right, playing it in a deadpan cool Switchblade Sisters kind of way, i.e. in on the joke but still badass.

That said, Bowangam Bowanga is not perfect: when we see a scene early on of a giant gorilla (Ray Corrigan?) holding hands with a white native girl as they stop to look at the white hunters, we're encouraged to hope this will turn into an Untamed Mistress/Bride of the Beast type of thing. Very exciting to imagine these girls protected by some big gorilla muscle ala Julie London in Nabonga. 

Sadly, that gorilla suit is never seen again. 

Anyway it's all over too soon to get mad, climaxing with a chase along the beach and a sudden use for the fireworks Sparafucile  mentioned at the beginning. As the tribe begrudgingly salutes farewell from the cliffs, the three white men and the girl who helped them escape link arms, singing, and skipping into the sunset like they're headed off to see the wizard or dub Lina Lamont. 

Nobody is oppressing nobody. That is a miracle.

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EEGAH!
(1962) Dir. Nicholas Merriwether (Arch Hall Sr.)
**/*

The 7'2" giant known as Richard Kiehl (The Spy who Loved Me; The Humanoid) finds a great early role as a giant prehistoric man living out in the Palm Springs desert who abducts foxy Roxy (Marilyn Manning), irking her towheaded, apple-cheeked, gas jockey crooner boyfriend Tom (Arch Hall Jr) in this drive-in schlock "classic." Pitched somewhere between a goofy (but deadpan) comedy and sci-fi/horror, it's a bit of doomed romance, fish-out-of-water comedy, dune buggy bragging, guitar crooning, and anthropological sexy nightmare.

Events kick in when Roxy locks eyes with a giant cave man crossing the road in the dark and empty desert night, after driving home from visiting Tom at the gas station. She tells her dad (director/producer/nepotist Arch Hall Sr.) about the encounter; and eager for a book to write, he sets off to scout around the area and see for himself. When he doesn't meet them at their appointed desert rendezvous the next day, Roxy and Tom eat up some time tooling through the desert sand in his ginchy yellow dune buggy. We learn Tom puts water into his tires so they get better traction in sand. Cool tip! What he's not good at, we can glean from Roxy's frustration with him, is "sealing the deal." When they spend the (day-for) 'night' around a (never seen) 'fire' after an unsuccessful day searching, the only relief from their strained relationship comes from on e of his not-bad Donny and Joe Emerson-esque sad-sweet songs about some other girl, named Valerie. The song is OK, but it doesn't necesssarily have the desired effect. Before Hall can awake the next day, Roxy has been literally swept off her feet by lusty Eegah, who brings her back to his cave boudoir, luckily dad is already there, lying helpless with a broken collarbone, trying to establish basic communications (he's learned the giant's name is "Eeegah")

Unlike most hormonal monsters, Eegah is not necessarily bad nor is he good; he's merely a giant savage with no social conditioning and no outlet for his bristling hormonal urges (being all alone in his Bronson cave for way too long). So we have Roxy trying to keep Eegah distracted with singing and so forth while immobilized dad shouts encouragement to "keep his mind on something else!"

Hall Sr. really comes into his own as an actor in this stretch of the film, alternately flippant and consoling, with a nasal but resonant voice that evokes a slightly drunker and more patronizing version of Lyle Talbot. It's also pretty clear he dubs Eegah's low end Popeye-esque muttering (which gives the two of them a kind of unspoken link, as if Eegah is some unconscious incestuous projection ala Forbidden Planet). To keep Eegah occupied, Roxy shaves off his beard (symbolism!), while singing "Whiskers." She makes eating, drinking, and sleeping pantomimes, and is introduced to the mummified heads of Eegah's ancestors Eventually, all out of distractions, the romantic music surges up as Eegah starts tearing off her clothes. Meanwhile dad can only yell: "Don't upset him!" 

Thus Eegah is succinct and potent in conveying the dangers of being a hormonal male who has not learnt restraint prior to the introduction of a sexy babe. All we men have to learn to reign in our desires, lest we become sexual predators before we can even graduate middle school. What makes it all the weirder is the uniqueness in the monster annals of this sort of scene, making the film worth checking out in and of itself.  Eegah is just too big for his uncivilized nature not to be a direct threat to civilization, and virgin or not, sex with a giant would probably be kind of a chore for a 'teenager' of Roxy's small stature, though part of her is still responding (that big shaven Kiehl jaw works its magic). Still a night with a teenage werewolf or the creature from the Black Lagoon would be far worse. 

Manning, bringing out the beast.

Meanwhile, every time we cut from the cave and Roxy's nervous distraction tactics to the blazing sun with ineffectual Tom waving his widdle wifle around and yelling her name, a blare of ominous music plays up, as if he's losing his mind. Fans of his sneering psycho in The Sadist will wince at the thought Hall Jr. too may have lapsed back into savagery. I haven't seen The Sadist myself but I hear he's amazingly creepy, and watching Eegah! I believe it. With his pouffy hair and 'Michael J. Pollard hit by a shovel' face there's something about him where you would probably feel both relieved and unnerved if he was dating your daughter. He seems psycho on the edges but reliable in the center, and in the best scene in the film, he rescues Roxy and her father, while Eegah chases the dune buggy, nearly grabbing onto the back seat several times, throwing boulders when the buggy gets far enough away down the cliff, all filmed from the backseat of the buggy to create a very realistic and scary stretch we'd see later aped in films like The Terminator.

one of Eegah's relatives

Despite being a goofy kick, Eeagah! has some real speculative insight about the existence of a race of giants in the antediluvian era (i.e. Goliath, Gilgamesh, Genesis, 6.4) Is Sasquatch just one of the old giants of old, the Nephilim, who didn't sit still for a shave from the Roxy of modern civilization? (1) 

Eegah, like Lobo with that angora sweater in Bride of the Monster, is left a piece of Roxy's perfumed cloth to haunt him as he recovers from Tom's bullets. He even puts the cloth under the nose of his ancestral heads so they can smell her eligibility to join the family. Finally, lovestruck and hormonally locked-in, poor Eegah takes a drink from his sulphur spring (perhaps the key to his longevity) and then heads down the mountain, easily tracking her down to the Palm Springs hotel lodge, where the rest of the cast seem to spend all their free time. Out back by the pool, Tom is playing with his band, singing a slightly more upbeat song with yet another girl's name in the title ("Vicky").  Roxy doesn't even notice. She's missing Eegah ("I just know something's happened to him"). Dad, arm in a sling, smiles and says she's just like her late mother. He watches the kids dance and doesn't get it - it looks like fighting to him, he says.

Soon enough, it will be. Eegah is making his way through the restaruant!

It's worth it just to see giant Eegah beating up on Hall, throwing people like assistant and future Rat Pfink a Boo-Boo director DP Ray Dennis Steckler (there with his wife/star/muse Carolyn Brandt) into the swimming pool and ripping it out the deep end pool ladder and waving it over his head to smash on the gathered cops does the heart good. Eegah may not know how turn door knobs, or what the door sign that says "Ladies" means. But that's okay, Eegah, girls love a big dumb savage, especially, like Samson in Nabonga, once they're safely dead. Tom, Gorman you better step up your game! Dearly departed virile giant ape monsters done laid down the gauntlet! 

NOTES:

1. I was told by a spirit guide that the reason for the flood was that the watchers wanted to expunge the giants from the earth, but that some of them survived, those high in the mountains where the waters did not reach.  Hiding for centuries, they're immortal and able to move in and out of other dimensions to escape detection (the 'Watchers' turned off that feature in our DNA so we wouldn't be able to escape our time/space confines and be able to track them back to Mt. Olympus/Valhalla/Heaven, whatever, and try to usurp them) which is why we've never caught one or found a body. Already wild and untamable, the aeons have seen the giants revert back to precambrian savagery but they are still more advanced than us, due to more 'activated' watcher DNA than we're allowed. Make of that what you will, Arch Hall Jr.! 

Playing Card Flapping in the Wheel of Progress: BEAST OF YUCCA FLATS (1961)

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HIPPOLYTAThis is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.
THESEUSThe best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.
HIPPOLYTAIt must be your imagination then, and not theirs.
THESEUS If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men.                                                 --- Shakespeare, Midsummer's Night Dream 
NARRATOR - Flag on the moon. How did it get there?
                                        - Coleman Francis, Beast of Yucca Flats

(Night 9 of the 12 Days of Ed Wood)

Not to brag, but those of us who were kids in the 70s had great imaginations. Forged in the banal eternity of backseats spent on long drives for hour after hour while dad chain-smoked, cursed the traffic and the radio blared static, our minds imagined whole movies we'd only heard about from start to finish. I remember taping a picture of Charlie's Angels to the back of dad's seat and pretending it was a built-in TV screen. Unless we had a super 8mm projector and a highlights reel bought from the camera store or the back pages of Famous Monters of Filmland, everything we saw onscreen was transitory, never to be rewound to 'check' if what we thought we saw was really there or not. If you missed it, you then had to take some other kid's word on what happened the next day until, maybe years later, it showed up again as a rerun (and the part you remember may well be edited for time and/or content so now way to prove what you saw wasn't there). From recess and lunch time synopses of the previous night's TV movies or shows, our minds filled in enough wild effects to make Lucas and Spielberg give up and go home. For us, movies were just the finger pointing to the moon. Our imaginations followed the direction and filled space with an array of monsters.

Now, with CGI, we laugh at anything other than the finest finger, the most vividly rendered CGI moon. Our imaginations have shrunk from misuse, the way our brain's ability to produce dopamine shrinks when when addicted to opiates. 

Not all bad movies are gems. Contrasting the totemistic ardor of auteurs like Cozzi, Wood, and Steckler,  bores like Jerry Warren, "Vic Savage," Larry Buchanan, and W. Lee Wilder seem contemptuous of anyone who watches their films anywhere but on the late-late show for any reason other than to put themselves to sleep. Films like The Incredible Petrified World, The Creeping Terror, Face of the Screaming Werewolf and Mars Needs Women make perfect coma inducers when you can't sleep in some cheap motel and they show up  at the 4 AM late late late show.

But! There is yet another, for sometimes the sublime is awakened almost despite the filmmakers' best efforts towards mediocrity. Sometimes we get the nouvelle vague child's eye surrealism and the coma-inducing flatline. The perfect storm of un-storminess. Probably the best example is Coleman Francis'Beast of Yucca Flats. One can never tell if he's trying to actually make a good film or not. I hope I never find out.



"Touch a button. 
Things happen.
A scientist becomes a beast."

The first few minutes of Beast of Yucca Flats create a grim, sleazy claustrophobic atmosphere that runs counter to the rest of the film with its outdoor desert expanses. First thing is what we hear: the loud ticking of a clock, time's relentless nightstick strike. A pretty young woman gets out of the shower, sits down on her single bed against the wall in a closet sized room, and get strangled, killer POV-style. The camera seems to crowd her into the corner of her bed--so tight it's like she's caught on a glass slide. As we fade to credits the killer holds onto her legs and we see the bed starting to rock - leading to whatever weird rape-necrophilia sleaze one's mind can conjure in 1961 without waking the censor. Roll the opening credits! Let us never speak of this scene again, except to wonder if Francis shot it, or it was inserted later by some profit-minded producer who wanted to at least give the people something salacious, so wisely tagged up front, like Bardot's nude scene in Contempt.  (1) It keeps us on edge for the rest of the film, slightly unnerved. But not to worry, there's nothing else like it ahead. 

And that's fine. It's not why we're here. Coleman's weird fractured poetic narration and Tor Johnson presence are the reasons, which means we're Ed Wood-ophiles. Here he starts things out as a Russian defector who has a flammable brief case with secret information on his nation's moon landing (hint: the"flag on the moon" Francis' narration mentions isn't ours, which is still eight year away). KGB spies intercept him at the airport, shoot his CIA escorts, chase him out to an empty field in the desert right before a nuclear bomb goes off. (he didn't see the "Testing Range" sign in his haste)  No longer a scientist dedicated to "the betterment of mankind" but "a beast." The moon forgotten, Tor wanders around the desert, strangling people with his meaty sunburned fingers like a combination Hulk and the mutant father from Barn of the Naked Dead. When he's riled, which is often, Tor waves a cane and makes dubbed "yaargh!" noises (I think that's Coleman's voice dubbing him as well). Two local police search for the killer and end up shooting at the wrong man, a father trying to find his two "adventurous boys" after they get lost wandering around in the scrub of "Yucca Flats" after the family stops for a picnic.  

The film is barely an hour long, at least ten minutes too short to be just an actual movie. And yet it feels like forever, despite the beauty of the rock formations that look like a drunkenly passed-out Willdendorf Venus. 

Why this film is one of the 12 Days of Wood not only cuz Tor Johnson but because the thunderous "Wagner with the DT's" library score is the same one Ed used for Plan Nine from Outer Space (and Ed's pal Ronnie Ashcroft used for Astounding She Monster)."Yucca Flats" isn't a real place, apparently,  but the name of an apartment complex Ed once lived in (making Ed the real beast?). Some of Francis' voiceover seems a bit slurred (!) and some of that Ed Wood madness is apparent in both the narration's associative leaps, and the ease with which a big nuclear blasts erupt at any given time in any given place (ala the end of Bride of the Monster). The only debit: Francis lacks Wood's cock-eyed genius. If Wood wrote the script, Yucca might have more cult status. Instead, for Yucca to improve on repeat viewings, you need to surrender to it the same way you might surrender to Jess Franco or Jean Rollin, i.e. to be half-asleep when you start. When you need to escape even the confines of comfort and retreat into a kind of holding pattern, void of all meaning and value, move to Yucca Flats. It's a film you can fall to sleep to every night for years on end and never see the same movie twice, or any movie at all, really. While Coleman's narration postulates that all the events you see onscreen are linked to the inevitable backlash against mankind's relentless scientific searching beyond the atom. The agents of cold war doing terrible things to humanity, the images show strange looking people running and shooting and waving their arms as they race around the middle of Southwestern scrubland or hang out at a small local airstrip (maybe the same one from Wood's Fugitive Girls? Either way, we know Francis must have a plane there; it's practically a co-star of all three of his films). 

Say what you will about Ed Wood, he had a sound recording engineer on the set, and a boom mic. Sometimes. And Criswell's narration was surging ever higher on plumes of uniquely Woodian giddiness and not some labored striving for sociopolitical resonance.

Still, Coleman's narration is pretty special: a weird series of fractured haiku that works as the bitter existential Korean war vet drunk to Ed's rapturous WW2 vet boozy cinemania. Obsessed with progress and the way if you're not careful you could wind up in the wrong hunk of desert at the wrong time and be zapped by an A-bomb, or shot at by a deputy from an airplane, Francis' jaundiced view of 'scientific progress' seems to be that it's better to be either high in the sky or asleep in your bed. We agree. Be the one killing, not the killed. And if you're going to get caught in something, let it be a race for the betterment of mankind rather than the grinding wheels of progress, or the blast radius of the nuclear age. Warped, deep, occasionally slurred, Francis' jaundiced outlook is rife with strange and abstract tangents that makes the Ed McMahon rants of Daughter of Horror seem like Raymond Carver. Furthering his bitterness, a girl is rescued alive from the beast. "She's still breathing," and then seconds later "doctors can't help her. Maybe angels, but not doctors." We don't see any noticeable change, she seems asleep. It's such an odd choice on Francis' part. Either she's dead or she's alive. In the Francis zone, she survives, only to die somewhere right in front of you. Or the cop can't find a woman's pulse to save his life. 

If you're up for it, though, Francis' voiceover is a thing of slow-action beauty, and perhaps influential on future filmmakers. Watch Yucca and then watch Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg back and you'll hear the same hypnotic repetitions of words and ideas, the same mix of sensationalism, poetry, and somnambulistic drifting. Sentences come back around like the shooting gallery ducks you missed the first time. Always with the wheels. With Maddin, it's the wheels of moving train taking him away from Winnipeg while he drifts in and out of sleep; for Francis, it is surely the wheels of progress, ensnaring everything and everyone while they're rousted from the planes and beds and sent staggering dazedly into the unceasing desert sun. 

One element that would have helped things along would be some indoor soundstage shots. After that opening, we seldom leave the glaring outdoors during the day (or day-for-night) but at least it's in black-and-white and well-preserved; it feels like looking at an Ansel Adams or Dorothea Lange desert photography book while wearing very dark sunglasses. Is it supposed to be (day for) night, or did the photographer put on a sun filter? The answer is just the howl of the wind, or is it a coyote? Either way, it's not on the soundtrack. Nothing is... except Francis' narration, the occasional gun shot or snatch of dialogue (never synced to lips) and that incessant Plan Nine music (its brassy stabs never once synced to the editing).

There are so few indoor shots in Flats though, and so little in the way of foley/diegetic sound, you may get a little wacky after awhile. But Francis know what he's doing. Aside from the opening murder shot there is one more scene set in the one-floor bungalow of one of the deputies, that makes us instantly feel calmer and sleepy. It's the morning, the killer has struck; a deputy, Jim Archer, is roused from his morning shut-eye by a visit from the sheriff, irritating his sleepy wife who sits up and makes sure to show off her deep tan legs and cleavage (terrible bangs though). "See ya later honey" we hear a voice says, in that ghostly post-sync echo so familiar to fans of Doris Wishman. The wife scowls and gets back into bed so we can dig those tanned legs. We never hear her voice, just look at her dirty blonde wig; her heavy tan and her nice legs as she gets into bed. Would we could stay with her and go to sleep instead of going outside in the heat to shoot at innocent men and climb mountains to nowhere. Instead we're back out amidst the yucky flats, the voluptuous curves, the rocky hills. 

"Vacation time - man and wife; unaware of scientific progress.

Their car pulls over on the road so the man is checking the oil; Jeff's scarred and meaty hands wrap around him from behind, killing him instantly. We think surely "wife" is next!

She nods off a bit in the sun, unaware of the scientific progress that has left her husband dead. We're expecting Tor to grab her from the front seat, like he did with Mrs. Trent in Plan Nine, but instead his hands slowly emerge from the dark of the backseat! Tor in the backseat; how did he get there? Or if he's not, how could he reach right through the back of the back of the VW hood without the wife looking anywhere but her cigarette?

Close-ups of the man Joe Dobbs picked up, Jim Archer (Bing Stafford) "wounded parachuting over Korea... also caught in the race for the betterment of mankind." He's "trained to hunt down his man, and destroy." Here is a man who never closes his mouth or opens his eyes. We get a close-up so we can wince at his crooked teeth. 
 
Another family meanwhile is on the road. ("Vacation time. Man and wife. Unaware of scientific progress"). They stop at a gas station. The gas station attendant is lazy, cooked by the heat. Francis' narration sizes the guy up for us. Whatever wheel he's caught in or progress he's unaware of, well, count him out. 

"Boys from the city, not yet caught in the wheel of progress, now feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs."

It's clear this was never a movie meant to be studied. It hopes you are paying, at best, moderate attention so you don't really notice there is no 'movie'per se, just a very familiar library score and calming but urgent narration over shots of the desert and people running around.  The playing card named Jeff Dubrovsky rattles every spoke on the wheel of progress. The reels of the film keep spinning, barely pausing to observe the passing absurdity. I could listen to it forever, dozing in and out of a pleasant Remeron coma. 

Erich Kuersten... dozing off... 
in a Remeron coma. 
Watching. 
Watching because Tor. 

Jeff throws a huge rock (which is clearly a real rock. Way to go, Tor!) and then shakes his fists at the sky like an old codger at those rascally kids, but since it's Tor he also evokes an infant. As Francs' narration might put it: The old and the new, all at once.
 
Rock thrown, fist shaken, Dubrovsky begins the laborious process of laying himself down on the very hard and rocky ground to take a nap. His reticence to just plop down onto the cave floor brings to mind how painful it must be to be Tor's sunbaked Nordic skin, smashed between a hot, rocky surface and that immense wrestler weight, like a gentle cashmere sweater packed under a bowling ball. We feel bad watching a man of Tor's age, skin pigment, and girth, forced to stagger around under the blazing desert sun for hours on end. Surely there are easier ways to make a living?  But we're here; we may as well make sure he did not sweat in vain. So onward Tor raves; motionless mom stands; relentlessly dad flees; incessantly Jim Archer shoots; gingerly the boys wander. Having sought shelter in Jeff's cave, we get the second best shot of the film, when we see Tor lying down in the shade from the boy's POV deep behind him in the shadows, and then they're carefully creeping past his sleeping girth out into the blazing (?) day/for/night sun. 

Anyway, that bit in the cave, the backseat strangulation, and the very last shot with the baby jackrabbit are alone enough to make Yucca worth it a thousand viewings over (it actually gets better around the fifth visit). It's classic Tor. Though the scene with him laying halfway on top of the dead girl could have gone all roughie/sleazy; it's clear Tor is a very gentle giant, which gives the scenes where he's lustily lashing his radioactive lips while lying atop her a jokey playful edge. We never hear the sound so we don't know if his mouth is open because he's an insane lusty monster trying to kiss or lick her or is he just moving his mouth, presuming dialogue will be dubbed in later? She's supposed to be dead, or nearly dead. But she seems like she's suppressing a giggle, or a wince.

There she is (above), Mrs. Francis, standing cactus-like in the middle of the desert; picnic basket ever at the ready, forgotten by all but Colemanm's camera, which does at least cut back to her occasionally. She's so gone it never even occurs to her she can put the basket down. Maybe she thinks some average bear is going to rush out and grab it the moment it's on the ground? Even a hungry coyote smelling the food might bring some kind of relief to her awful isolation. 

"Vacation time. People travel east, west, north and south. "
Though his entire oeuvre was more than a bit bent by his joyless outlook on life, his natural affinity for the grotesque, and his utter lack of attention to filmic detail, this Luddite tale of an obese scientist turned into a ravening atomic Beast survives as his weirdest anti-achievement. - Alfred Eaker, 366 Movies.
We end the film with the the wife wandering alone and forgotten around in the scrub; the two boys are rescued in long shot with the 'officers.' Dad is still wandering with the 'neighbor.' The night, like life, crawls onward. Mom is still there, somewhere presumably. As Jeff dies, a fearless young jackrabbit comes up and start trying to get at whatever snack the dying Tor has in his shirt pocket. Gingerly, with the gracefulness of a tender giant, his meaty hand pets the rabbit and then he is dead. This is life in Yucca Flats. No mercy for the loser. The cops and kids don't even think to put a blanket over him to keep the coyotes off the carcass. Off they wander, perhaps to get a look at those pigs or flying saucers.

But these are the rewards to the few who made it to the end, those who used their stupefied bemusement to transcend rather than doze off. Or both. The beauty of the Coleman Francis' opus, is that you can do it all.


NOTES:
1.  I remember a very disturbing opening scene from a film called Monster of Piedras Blancas, where a young couple sneak away from their friends to a nearby cave to fool around, but are surprised by a monster who rips off one of (or both of) their heads. Too disturbed to continue watching, we flipped the channel to either the opening song of Bikini Beach (I just remember a couple kissing while eating a long piece of red licorice, which seemed, after the decapitation and the girls pitiful screaming, to be extra horrific to my six or seven year-old mind, burning the juxtaposition into my childhood mind). Now going to watch Piedras on DVD, that intro scene is gone, was it not part of the 'actual' film? Like Yucca, the rest of Piedras Blancas seems very boring by comparison. The DVD even has the aftermath of the scene - the headless couple found on the beach but now we only see them from way up atop the dunes looking down. What happened?

The Far Outsider: SHAITANI DRACULA

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"Confusion has made its masterpiece." 
                                             - Macduff (Macbeth -Act 2, Scene 1 - Shakespeare)

Man, my 12 Days of Ed Wood has won ray over schedule(this is only night 10), but I have an excuse: India's Harinam Singh and his 1999 (sometimes listed as 2006 since that's when it was discovered and shared and embraced by the weird film community) anti-opus Shaitani Dracula (English translation: "Satan's Dracula"):  Actor, director, writer, presumably editor, Singh is a one man band of cosmic proportions. He knows not how to focus a camera, nor tell a story, nor direct a scene, nor--for a single moment--be anything but wildly hilarious. This is anti-genius of the sort that makes Ed Wood's best seem woefully coherent. 

Consisting of mostly interchangeable set of blurry shots of monsters (dudes in masks, girls in plastic fangs and cut-out styrofoam cooler-lid wings) chasing people, the film pulses lightning, and hot girls cooling down in outdoor showers at night (fully clothed); dark cloud insert, lurches into daytime standing around by cars and girls arguing with dopey men. Crazy-lame howls and high-pitched titters, rain and wind effects fill up the soundtrack. Music and songs from old Bollywood classics start and stop in a random crazy quilt of overlapping and jarring noises and "booooo-oooo!" style spooky vocalizing.  Add mixed up time frames, interchangeable actors, inscrutable dialogue (none of his films, as far as I know, have ever been dubbed or subtitled into English), stir, rinse and assemble with a rusty splicer and a blindfold. The resulting mess can set you free. If you believe in madness. 

I know I'm not alone in my reverence. Diabolique's Keith Allison exclaims: "It is a film so far beyond the pale of anything we can recognize as a movie that one can hardly call it a movie. An experience, perhaps. Enlightenment." Dan Budnik of Bleeding Skull announces: "You can try to blink the crazies away but this film won’t let it go. It’s a child’s vision of a vampire movie that verges on a wet dream of epic proportions." And Teleport City declares Shaitani Dracula to be: "a film so bonkers on every single level that it has become a legendary work of art."  Wayne Butane exclaims "It's a perfect storm of filmmaking incompetence."  The Wood of Bollywood shall endure! 

Gaze into the eyes of your dark lord

Singh himself plays the title role a middle-aged Indian man, ever-clad in a dark blue Union cavalryman's hat and coat (no cape, and no reason). With a jet black mustache, double chin, and twinkly eyes bouncing along on presumable cue cards to the left of the camera, age makes a lot of grand announcements--in booming echo--laughing maniacally and saying "Dracula" every other word, as if continually reminding himself and everyone else he's the star. He keeps his head centered in widescreen medium-close-up (ala above) moving slowly from side to side, giving the impression of being vaguely animatronic  Sometimes we cut to him wearing his dime store plastic fangs but he looks like he's always trying to spit them out (if you've ever worn them yourself as a kid, you probably get why).Most of the time though, is spent watching masked monsters wrestle with scantily clad young maidens while thunder crashes on the soundtrack, the horror movie archetypal primal scene stripped down to an eternal Halloween wrestling match. Stoop-shouldered men in skeleton sweatshirts and flea-bitten wolf costumes throw biker shorts-clad maidens to the ground for some air groping. 

Here's an example: a pair of lewd older male buffoons walk through an emptied park at nighttime and are gobsmacked by the sight of a gorgeous girl taking a backlit shower (clothed). They walk behind her making lascivious gestures but then she suddenly turns around in a wolf man masks (with spiky red hair) and bat wings. They run! Next shot they're leisurely climbing into a van, all relaxed with about five other guys, as if Singh needed a shot of them escaping so just filmed them climbing into the van to go home after an all-night shoot. 

That's OK. You either love this film instantly or watch five minutes and turn away. Some of us just want to look in his big Harinam Singh/Dracula eyes, his very plain and unscary house, his stable of pretty girls in tight biker shorts, his mix of "where do I put my hands?" self-consciousness, delight with all he surveys, and nervousness his crew is fucking up, i.e. failing, as usual, to keep him (or anything) in focus.

As yes, focus. It's a problem that occurs all through the film, a problem that even the most incompetent western directors usually master fairly well. In fact, if a shot is suddenly in focus, the question arises of whether it was lifted from another movie, replete with incorrect (stretched or compressed) aspect ratio. But hey! Singh is making a movie, or something, and he's stocked it with babes who have to do what he tells them. Heh Heh. And what he tells them, presumably, is to take lots of outdoor showers, in the park, at night, with their tight biker shorts and halter tops on; and that later they should lie still on tables while he paws at them like the Indian Paul Naschy. As with Naschy, it doesn't track as offensive since it's so naive, so unfiltered. I remember when that Farrah Fawcett Majors swimsuit poster came out. I was ten years old and hat it on my bulletin board opposite my bed.  I used to gaze at her longingly the wee hours of the morning, flushed with a strange, delirious desire I could not explain, an all-consuming child's first rushes of lust, the sort that as yet knows not of any attached release or fulfillment, or shame.

Focus may be a big problem, and narrative may or may not exist since I don't know the language, but none of that matters when the soundtrack is so richly insane. Thunder crash inserts bridge each shot; wind howls; inappropriate orchestral cues surge and retreat. Sometimes the sound kicks out altogether or we hear dialogue leaking over from some long cut clip. For songs we hear the same classic Asha Bhosle/R.D. Burman song (from an older movie) played twice. There is no dancing or lip syncing whatsoever during these moments though. The movie keeps going, with scenes of yelling. We get a startlingly in-focus shot of a very attractive and well made-up girl yelling at a boy who doesn't seem to deserve her. The shot seems lifted from another movie. When the music ends there's demented laughing, bowed saws, lurching drums, and high pitched giggling, like a man trying to do an impression of a girl doing an impression of a laughing mouse. There's also the lamest werewolf howl ever heard, with the voice of the actor cracking feebly over the high notes. 

As is often the case with Bollywood films, within every few sentences of Hindi spoken, an English phrase is likely to occasionally flit by, like "I think you're right!" or "you understand!?" or "are you possible?" Magically, this keeps our English speaking ear's alert for more. Something magical happens, rather than just 'turning off' your brain to the spoken foreign language (if there are subtitles), you may begin, as I did to have (presumable) auditory hallucinations. I even wrote down some of my favorite nonsense phrases my ears heard in the rushes of rapid fire Hindi: "She had a cabbage to you," / "Jazzercize my bag handling," and--my favorite-- "the ladies are not a salter to your Brenda Lou." 

During the day we the cast of young people hang around the park in, standing side to side in a long row so the widescreen camera can get them all in the shot. Don't ask why they decided to all go camping in the middle of a well-lit public park. That's not your business. Maybe they had a permit. Maybe they didn't. Maybe that's something people in India just get to do, like hippies up in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, only with a lot more make-up. It's just one of those things that makes Shaitani Dracula such a trip. And don't worry, there are only maybe four or two daytime exterior shots in the whole film. Most of the time it's night and there's no time to figure out what's happening onscreen before some girl in a red-haired wolf mask leaps out of the bushes, or Dracula comes floating by, laughing maniacally with hands outstretched, camera wisely not showing what's under his floating feet (my guess, an AV cart stolen from a nearby elementary school). Though there are plenty of people around, women have a habit of wandering alone into the darkness. Or sleeping, sometimes with big lights right outside behind the tent canvas, making it seems like they just pulled over to sleep in front of some random backlit green screen during an all-night film shoot. This allows all sorts of weird ghost like things to occur, including a goose, and a foreground looming face with a big beard, a kind homunculus / Tibetan demon / half-gypsy combination lit up in red leering out at the camera. Chilling! Then you realize it looks like a bearded actor/red gel lighting combination recycled from Singh's Shaitani Atma (1998) That crazy goose, though - no explanation. 

I hope I never know whether or not it was intentional. 

My favorite monsters are the girls in white with the bare midriffs (left) who sprout fangs, and badly-cut styrofoam wings and make little flying gestures with their fingertips, arms akimbo, trying to keep their balance while standing up on, presumably. AV carts pulled along by people just below camera. 

 Though many are chased and mauled and pounced on, no one in film seems to actually die, nor bleed, and certainly no one comes back as a vampire, or seems to remember what just happened one minute to the next. At one point, while lustily rolling around on top of a nubile victim, our wolf man just stops, gets up, finds his wolf mask, which slipped off in the fracas, and puts it back on, camera still rolling, the girl patiently waiting for him to resume his assault. 

Shaitani Dracula practically pees on itself with the desire to please, to deliver the kind of movie that can enjoyed in a blurry millionth generation dupe on a cell phone or in a movie theater so crowded with restless infants, chatter, and cigarette smoke that paying attention to anything longer than a single random shot or two is impossible. It's a movie that can be engaged with anywhere along its timeline. Slice off any two minutes of the film and you can grow a whole movie from the cutting. One gets the impression there is no script as such, just Singh running around giving impromptu directions while pulling feebly at the focus lever. Once enough chasing around occurs it all inevitably resolves itself in a the monster's sort of death (by being pummeled by a wooded cross, or in his other films, hung or burnt alive by an angry mob). In Shaitani Dracula, the expansive action constricts down to a long drawn-out, hilarious "fight" between the lead--a dishy lady in tight red vinyl halter top / biker shorts combo--and Dracula. There are lots of terrible fake punches. Her hot legs keeps dragging the camera down to them like they have gravity no tightening the tripod can combat.  But then, in the middle of their climactic skirmish, he cuts away to a blurry shot of a guy walking aimlessly around in a skeleton hoodie. Why? We never learn, as we go back where we left off in the ogling and cross-waving. On his end, Dracula inflicts many, many fake elbow jabs, the sort five year-olds might slow-mo give each other after watching the WWF or Batman. If that's the kind of thing you and your friends used to do (as I did with mine), you're liable to love it, like sneezing out a chunk of your brain and finding a long forgotten breakfast cereal toy prize 

OTHER SINGHS

I've seen this film five times since my first viewing last month; I haven't pledged as much energy to his other films yet, which are viewable on YouTube in even worse shape than Shaitani Dracula ) I did watch most of his Shaitani Aatma (1998) which seems like a dry run for the 'magic' perfection of Shaitani Dracula. None of them have subtitles on YouTube, but they don't entirely need them. The elements never waiver. A bunch of young people talking somewhere about the monsters, contrasted with monsters stalking and molesting the young people. That they are so viewable even without knowing the language proves their mettle. Without subtitles or dubbing it would be hard to stick with the average Bollywood feature, which is usually three hours long and suffers (in western eyes) from a tendency to bog down in soapy intergenerational melodrama, pastorale romance, and interminable village dancing.  Harinam Singh's films clock under two hours and "focus" on what we want most: guys in monster masks chasing pretty people around through misty gardens at night while thunder strikes, wind effects howl, and someone goes "booo-OO--ooo." 

All that aside, like the average childhood recollection, folded into the mostly wholesome play violence and Halloween spookiness are some sexually unsettling moments. In one, we cut from some random scene into the middle of what is either a couple fooling around or the a kind of date rape. If you've ever been ready to leave a party and accidentally barged in on a couple getting busy in a bedroom where you thought the coats were kept, or something like, and you said sorry and closed the door and then thought, huh. Was that woman trying to get away from him? Was she even awake, or so drunk she didn't know what was going on? Was their consent there? You only saw for one second. What the hell do you do, besides nothing and then obsess periodically about it for the next 30 years?

As Singh's voice shouts at the end of the film as the survivors walk out of Drac's house into the morning sun, "Ah-MIN!" 


BAZIN + HARINAM = Post-Structuralist Ecstasy

The origin of mise-en-scene as a concept comes from Andre Bazin, the father of French nouvelle vague and auteur theory, who came of age in the movie houses of Paris in the wake of WW2. Hollywood imports--freed from six years of Nazi embargo--were once again flowing onto French screens, but very few had subtitles or French dubbing. These kids were so cuckoo for cinema they sat through them anyway. Being able to enjoy a film without having any idea what anyone was saying was to appreciate it as true art, as a system of images and music and sounds, freed from all the distractions of language. A film might be about a murder and greed run amok after a bank robbery, but Bazin and co. knew it was really about a bunch of male actors sitting around in a shadowy room. Freedom from language made guessing what came next impossible, with the result every film was 'new' the way it would be to a child who understands very little of adult conversation. After subtitles and dubbing came in, Bazin would keep this alienation affect alive by hopping from cinema to cinema, walking in on movies halfway through and leaving as soon as he deduced where it was going, thus to keep the sound and images 'pure' of narrative (and all the unconscious hypnotism such narratives induce).

Artists like Brecht and Godard thought to use this sense of narrative hypnosis against itself, thus to wake us up from the false pleasure/anxiety spectrum of narrative into something like truth, the truth of the real that lurks outside the Platonic cave. The truth can help us wise up to the signs and symbols our brains rely on to keep us asleep. It turns out our brain's willingness to plunge forward into the warm goop of story (the shadows on the cave wall) can be turned against itself, like holding a mirror up to one's own inner Medusa, letting us cut her head off and watch the truth emerge like Pegasus from her neck and fly us to freedom. 

Brecht and Godard do it intentionally, but when that carrot and stick style film reward/punishment dichotomy is derailed by incompetence (Wood, Singh), it's a heckuva lot more fun. We become wise to the mechanics of our own hypnosis and thus free from the anxiety of our age, in both senses of the word. Instead, we're delivered to a place of childhood rapture when even a threadbare thrill contrivance like Bride of the Monster or the YMC fair's rickety spook show ride could thrill our imagination while making us laugh and see through the contrivance at the same time. To be sure, there are monster movies that employ the same cheap latex Halloween masks and ratty bear suits, fog machines and haphazard editing of Singh. A lot of them are from Mexico but tend to be padded with lame comedy, soap opera angst, or wrestling. Watching Santo punch a cadre of shirtless foes in masks who just keep bouncing back up, over and over, gets monotonous. But watching guys in masks chase beautiful Indian girls in skin tight lame shorts, or women in masks or fangs and wings chasing men? Never. It's so basic, so primordial, so mythic,  it lives in the same happy place we find 'remembering' our favorite classic horror movies, rather even than seeing them. 

The catch with Singh's and Wood's kind of supreme WTF incompetence is is that it cannot be faked or even attempted. When normal people try to make an intentionally weird/surreal film it comes off as just hack posturing, like Modesty Blaise (1966), Boom! (1968) or Casino Royale (1967). But when an incompetent weirdo tries to make a 'normal' movie, it comes out like Plan Nine or Shaitani Dracula. David Lynch is the only American filmmaker to really crossover in both directions, but he's still has producers and investors who need profits. Sometimes, like in Mulholland Drive, he can cross over in such a way as he brings even the middle class and bourgeois audience along into the blue box abyss. But someone like Harinam Singh or Ed Wood have a gift for the opposite, from so estranging us from the narrative's normal symbolic order that our whole set of filmic expectations goes out the window. What is left after they are gone is a kind of giddy lysergic freedom from the bonds of language. It's better than being either safe at home or lost in the unfamiliar. It's finding one in the other and vice versa (not unlike an LSD trip) - the world finally locks into place by falling totally to pieces. Thanks Harinam! You broke it and fixed it at the same time!


Shaitani Dracula is currently only avail in various quality transfers with large "Gold Movies" or "Eagle" stamps on the edges of the screen and with no subtitles; the best I've found so far is here.

NOTES: 

1. HBO, AMC, IFC and their ilk rely wayyy too much on the 'smash cut rut'- my phrase for when two people meet somewhere, seem to barely like each other, and then we smash cut to them in mid pre-orgasmic rutting in some car or bedroom, thus skipping foreplay and everything else, their eyes usually glazed over and distracted. It was eye-popping / disturbing when they started doing it in the 1990s with shows like Rome, Oz and the Sopranos. Now it's so overused it's a wonder kids know what foreplay even is. HBO, you broke our society! No wonder dudes are such a menace these days (for more, see The Rutting Season)

Brokeback Barbarians vs. the Metalheads: CONQUEST (1983)

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 "No one can rule the sun!"

As DJ Stevie Wayne said, "there's something in the fog."

It's Day 11 of the 12 Nights of Ed Wood, a series I began back in October. but inexorably, it gets bogged, fogged, and waterlogged. But, there's so much to see - even when seeing the same things. Just like melting polar ice reveals strange prehistoric tundras on our Google Earth, so too does the ever-clearer and ever-sharper HD 2K-4K restoration of once pixelated, panned, scanned and streaky old bad movies reveal whole new vistas.

Of course, not everything is better for all the clarifying. This is especially true for a lot SFX that involve overlays, where a sharp outline around, say, giant ants or insects in Bert I. Gordon movies or Harryhausen movies where the background rear projection of the live actors in the background now look faded and washed out by contrast. Sometimes the harsh clarity of 4D after tge comforting fog of analog VHS, makes films look like Blanche Dubois suddenly exposed by the bright lights of a 2 AM closing time bar.  

Luckily (?) no amount of HD sharpening can pierce the 1983 Lucio Fulci entry in the post-Conan sweepstakes, Conquest.  It's fogged forever. Maybe its volcanic rocky surface still cooling, its oceans still condensing from the steam clouds, but fog obscures everything. On the one hand, did they not check the film stock? On the other, pretend it's intentional and embrace it. Suddenly everything is alive with the possibilities inferred by obscured perception. The result: Conquest becomes a big glowing, steaming fissure in the surface sword and sorcery genre. Genre traits and cliches creep out and/or tumble back in to be cooked and baked and boiled around it until the air is thick with steam and smoke and all that's left is a sticky crust of dried blood, burnt fur, dead bats and bromance that survives beyond death. Not unlike the silhouette animation of Lotte Ellinger or some kind of primordial cave wall shadow puppet show, our unconscious projectionists fills in the details the clouds obscure, or our convulsive DT-addled mind just grooves on the absence of any detail that might make us nauseous. Even primordial Tom Jones-style sexy meat eating, people being torn in half, or roasted on beds of coals, doesn't make us the least bit nauseous, as the fog makes it no more troublesome than a dream safely woken from. 


Meanwhile, like a blind person developing keener hearing, our ears tune deeper in than normal to the soundtrack and are deeply, satisfyingly rewarded with a rich tapestry of howls, squawks, distant animal grunts, whispered chanting, moans and murmurs. Claudio Simonetti's music churns up the mud with pulsing mellotron, an echo-drenched flanger and some gorgeous little synth moments. There's so little dialogue that when someone finally speaks it sounds odd, it's as if words have only recently begun to form like rivers condensing from the fog of inchoate growling. A wearying slog through blood and mud turns into drug dream poetry, especially if you watch it, as I like to do, while half-asleep, with good headphones on, the setting sun in blazing in your eyes through the open window. 



On the wise and 'good' side of the river, civilized but naive warrior youth Ilias (Andrea Occhipinti) is given a boat (looking suspiciously like a repurposed gondola prop) and a bow and arrow set by his sophisticated peaceful village and then launched on his evil-fighting rumspringa. Barely has he landed before his presence disrupts the mystical reverie of the lady who runs these forbidden lands, the brain-eating sorceress Ocron (Sabrina Siani) With her black feather cape/boa and regular boa, naked body, and metal head, she looking a bit like Shanghai Lilly giving reverse-birth to an Oscar while recreating that 1981 Nastassja Kinski photo. The weird misogynistic subtext of her iron mask and naked body is perhaps the only really galling element, partially undone by her all-consuming power. Hanging around in her Abel Ferrara-does-Thulsa Doom smoky cavernous orgy den with her wolf-headed and iron masked minions, snorting powdered brains through a straw (I think) to get high, she's got the whole world believing the sun depends on her morning salutations to rise. Yet even the full head of a tasty, ripped-apart peasant girl can allay her mounting dread over the wanderer with his glowing blue bow. Look out, Ilias! You're about to get attacked by waves of Ocron's posse of genuinely weird and wolf muppet Chewbacca-style raiders and their iron masked associates. You're gonna need back-up. Enter Mace, (Jorge Rivero) who wields a great nunchucks-bolo-sling shot combo bop bop bop. Mace will be the Xena to Ilias' Gabrielle, the Robin to his Batman, the Jake to his Heath. Mace can talk to the animals. 

One of Fucli's secrets--one of the reasons his best films are so revered and hold up so well to repeat viewings (besides the gore)-- is his gift for paring out all the boring linear story-advancing subplots and details and 'suspense' crosscuts and character arcs that follow the hack auteur's idea of what a 'story' is all about. He does this by presuming you're familiar with these fantasy worlds. We don't need to know why Mace can communicate with animals because of The Beastmaster (an influential hit in Italy). We don't need to know why Ilias is sent across the river or why he's so much more civilized than everyone else in this haunted land, because of One Million BC. 

And yet, the film we're seeing is far from predictable because the plot and film language are so fractures. We're never quite sure who is who or what's going to happen. Connecting tissue like character backstory and cohesive mise-en-scene are jettisoned in order to put the viewer in a mindset similar to tripping, being asleep, schizophrenic, or having a flu-boosted nightmare, where signifier chains and logic are totally disrupted. If you need handrails to vault down the unlit cellar stairs, maybe Fulci isn't for you. If you just jump, heedless of a fractured skull, down into the inky darkness, then you love the minutely-etched ambiguity, where every reaction shot carries the DNA of a dozen possible meanings, including accidental, i.e. we're reading too much into it. Chances aren't we are. 

Usually, as per Deleuzian cinematic theory, film editing either operates on either the 'time-image' or 'movement-image' principle. In the movement image, we see X walking from across the street from a neutral vantage point; we see X open the door and walk inside from across the street. We follow the man from place to place as if a neutral observer. In time-image, we see the door from X's perspective; we see a close-up of X's hand turning the knob (if the filmmaker can afford inserts) and then X's view of the inside, then X's face as he sees the inside, and so on. Of course most films use both methods and we're used to both methods. But then crazy horror maestros like Fulci come along and use our comfort with these methods and they slam our fingers in the window jamb of these methods and boom! Half the critics feel miffed and blame their alienation on authorial incompetence, but others 'get' the disruptive 'nightmare logic' at work in his weird editing / story approach. They realize that even if the alienation is unintentional it's reminding them of a time when they hadn't seen enough movies to be predict what was going to happen next. Suddenly instead of a familiar world (i.e. the hero will survive to the final reel to kill the villain, who will surrender moments before being killed, the hero will walk away, the villain will then pull out a knife and try to throw it, the hero will whip around and kill him, etc.) we're in a world of vivid kinetic action and reaction - nothing is certain. Main characters can die at any time. That's why a film like Conquest holds up so well to repeat viewings... we never really see the same movie twice, regardless of how many times we watch it, because its pattern never follows a recognizable trajectory.  That blend of borrowing motifs from other films and yet abstracting what they add up to, simplifying yet complicating the overall impression by a refreshing lack of morals and messages or cumulative logic.

So we know Mace talks to animals  
Because The Beastmaster has been a hit in Italy, Mace is also loved by all animals. A hawk overhead warns him of approaching monsters; dolphins bite off Mace's bonds when he's crucified at the bottom of the sea; a snake shows Mace the way out of a rocky pit. As a reward, Mace won't kill animals, but on the other hand, he he no problem eating the ones someone else has killed after killing their killer --a guilt-free PETA-approved carnivore diet!  

Ilias and Mace's bond settled, and the film clicks into the gear at which it will stay for the rest of the film: Mace will teach Ilias of the ways of the wild and the dangers of this new land; Ilias will show Mace his magic bow. The animals shall look out for danger; the endless growling wolf man minions of Ocron shall come at them making actual "Grrr!" noises and always... always... in a cloud of murky fog. What could go wrong? Love? A volley of venomous demon darts!? 
 
Conquest gets a bad rap, the common consensus is it's too foggy; but it's a guilty pleasure for me and for many critics whose word I value.  I love how deftly it stays free of the detailed ponderous plotting that oft bogs these things down. There are no intro plot scrolls about days of olde; no voiceovers, no duplicitous courtiers, despotic generals, mustered extras, horses, dopey sidekicks, slapstick escapades, rollicking tavern fights, mickey mouse scoring, dungeon incarcerations, children, jugglers, rape, or extended macho torture sessions. A lot of people and monsters die but mostly it's just two dudes who like each other on a journey of amiable forward momentum, pausing every half a mile to bash a bunch of thugs and werewolves squarely on the sconce with a satisfying crunchy sound. 


We never learn what is in the straw Ocron and her posse pass from nostril to nostril, 
but the slow languid heavy way everyone moves gives us several interesting options. 

A bit like Clu Galager and Lee Marvin in The Killers (if Ronald Reagan was a metalheaded naked woman snake handler) they're cool enough you kind of want to be hanging out with them, even if three would probably be a crowd. A groovy homoerotic subtext thrives on close reading, depending on how much you want to feel around for it in the white-out fog. Hunky Mace knows some rivers are best left uncrossed ("your world is better than mine," he bemoans at one point, "but this is where I come from.") You can imagine the same scene in the third half of Brokeback Mountain with Heath Ledger as Mace, i.e. too repressed to suck venom out of Ilias's leg wound, the way, say, latter barbarian lavender soulmates like Xena and Gabrielle would do in nearly every episode (admittedly a decade later). Mace probably wouldn't even give him mouth-to-mouth if it was needed. He'd ask a bear to do it.

Still he's not afraid to pick his beau friend some healing lavender flowers when he's sick. Look at him there (below) - gazing pensively around in the early morning mist while Ilias pines away in engorged agonies back on the riverside. As you see below, the mist adds an impressionistic, almost Matisse-esque lyricism to the image. 

In today's more enlightened times, the closeted-even-to-itself sublimation of the Mace-Ilias bond seems quaintly timid, while the choice of making the most powerful woman in the film a naked, faceless monster is problematic. Good thing that the sort of critic who would dig deep enough to be offended by either reading will probably never take this fogbound journey into the unknown. Long hard to see (figuratively as well as literally), it's been remastered and made available online and in Blu-ray only because Fulci has such a fervent following. But even Fulci disowned it, walking away right after shooting. Hardocre Fulci apologists would rather champion something like The New York Ripper, wherein Fulci finally justifies his misogynistic accusers. It was his first in years without his go-to screenwriter Dardano Sacchetti, who was pretty pissed to be left off the team. The legend has it Fulci was losing his health and his damned mind and this was the proof. 

But what a run he'd had! Surely some of the classic Fulci magic had to spill over, even if no one saw it yet in that opaque fog. And there are plenty of touches that make it unmistakably Fulci: the idea that he almost never films from the expected angle or distance. The camera is seldom at eye level; usually it's kept low so the boys loom as giants with the magic hour sun behind their heads, or it swoops high up on a crane, as if some friendly giant beaming down at their foggy folly. The gore is always satisfying in its crunchiness. Callbacks to classic Fulci films abound: the way Ilias goes "yayayayayayaya" when batting away at the cave bats references Fulci's House by the Cemetery; the 'Eibon' symbol on Mace's forehead references Fulci's The Beyond; the gross close-ups of Ilias's venom and pus-engorged dart wound reference City of the Living Dead; the eerie center-screen-eyeless-head shot close-ups of the zombies resembles, you guessed it, Zombie. All in all, a Fulci capstone to a brilliant seven film / four year run. 

It's not perfect. I do wish we got to see Siani's pretty face, and I wish we got an occasional break from the fog. But any old film can be in focus, and we can see Siani in Ator, the Fighting Eagle and Throne of Fire. Two movies that are like the PG-13 daytime and Conquest is the R-rated night. 

I also find that, watching online, with pop-up ads, is the key. That's when it all comes together in some divine Woodsian masterpiece. Grubhub + half-asleep eyes + pareidolia fog + the Brooklyn accent of the voiceover artist doing Ilias's dub (the same guy who does Trash in 1990: The Bronx Warriors) + Chase Visathe primordial synths + the Clan of the Cave Bear make-up on the cute girl who lives just long enough to almost shag Ilias + So Clean for sleep apnea +  someone getting ripped literally in half + the web people emerging from their cliffside crevice, looking like Pillsbury snowmen and talking like Herve Villechaize. 

Maybe that scene sums up the appeal, the way it reminds me of childhood bonds: "Where is your friend?" the monster asks a crucified Mace. "I have no friends," Mace says. "You lie!" the monster shouts back.  It's so weird and basic and may evoke the realization that these guys are mentally ten years-old and making their first friend in school. Suddenly there he is: Ilias, rowing back to his Mace like a romantic gondolier as the moody Assault on Precinct 13-ish synth chords oscillate, shouting up at his crucified friend "Mace, I've come back! I'm not afraid!" My fellow Conan-loving friend Alan and I would have loved this movie, had we not been such snobs about dubbing. 

Prepared with rock bottom expectations, I loved it the first time I saw it, and I always will love it. I have been turning to it for sleep and stress relief ever since to the point my girlfriend rolls her eyes when she hears some of those cycling Simonetti synth riffs. As B&S's Sam Panico says: "Conquest is either the worst film you’ve ever watched or a batshit insane descent into mythical archetypes. There can be no middle ground."  Studied through a jeweler's lens, it may seem a cloudy piece of junk, but we of terrible vision know it's a rare jewel whose facets are best appreciated via indirect gazes i.e. like a ghost you can only see in reflections on your silverware. And man, is it ever relaxing - resisting the brain's attempt to memorize and overthink it through its mythic parade of the warmly familiar and the forever unknowable. Like half a Remeron chased with a smoke shop shot of kratom, it's the next best thing to being asleep. In his chapter on the film in his his Fulci book Beyond Terror, the amazing Stephen Thrower writes: "Half the fun of sleeping pills is in fighting the effects, staying awake to experience their weird pharmaceutical slurring: but few would want to feel that way whist trying to crawl through a Conan the Barbarian rip-off. " (183). 

Count me one of the few, Stephen. Let the fog come and rub the clarity from out my heart until all is fuzzy brain straw reverie. 

Yayayayayaya!  I'm not afraid! 

O'Keefe, the Imperturbable: ATOR: THE FIGHTING EAGLE, THE BLADE MASTER, THE IRON WARRIOR

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D'Amato captures a near-Frazetta style color and lighting scheme here.

"The dividing line between goodness and stupidity is very, very fine." - Zor, Ator 2: The Blade Master

Watching the Oscars last nightweek month in my usual squirrelly Sunday night stupor, all I could think of was.... Ah-tor. Ahhhh-TOR

I'm getting too old and weird to want 'great' movies that remind me of how racist, sexist, damaged and otherwise screwed up the world is, nor do I want movies to tell me, us, how love, hope, and the movies themselves can transform and effect social change. In addition to moving itself to tears with its own humble self-congratulations, Oscar seems to insist on telling us what to feel, which is love. Of the Oscar movies, I did dig Dune. That's as far as I'll go. 

Here's an example of how bad it's gotten. As you know, Sword and the Sorcerer finally came to Blu-ray. I got a review copy and I started to watch it and was instantly bored and bummed by the mix of way too much plot. There's an innocent naive and unprepared good king overthrown by evil magic-borrowing social climbing Richard Lynch, who's only real competition is a man called Lee Horsely who finds himself recruited in a tavern by an in-disguise princess offering sex in exchange for a hostage rescue. I needed instantly and suddenly to take a break, which means weeks have already gone by and it's collecting dust. The kind of escapism I need is too simple and pared down to get lost in big set pieces, writerly overthink, dated sexism, and derring do scored to bombastic hack sweep. 

To reiterate. For this old alcoholic, no more Oscar bait, no expansive sweep, no sexist blather. I need a film so cracked it crumbles into dust with the strike of a gong and the gleaming golden skeleton of true myth is revealed beneath its B-movie bones. That's ATOR! (It's pronounced "Ahh-tor." AHHHH-tor). Someone at Time Out once called Xena a "brain cooler". That put it so well. That's what I want, but even Xena got too complicated after the first season, what with the dips into musical episodes, Joxer's baggy pants routines, and sudden detours into profound social sermonizing and way too much female bonding. Now that we've come so far, Xena's cautious lavender hand-holding seems timid. And if there's no sexy frisson, why are we even watching? 

Brain, uncooled once again. Save me Ator.... the pool of escape is shrinking under the global warming summer sun.

ATOR, THE FIGHTING EAGLE
(1982) Dir. Joe D'Amato 
****
Pity poor Ator (Miles O'Keefe), in love with sister Sunya (Ritza Brown). But how can they be married when it is forbidden? Don't worry, you're adopted, Ator! As the son of Torin, you are destined one day to defeat "the Ancient One" - so as is custom in these things, a wise warrior swept you away from danger and left you with some farmers. Now you're all hot and in love with your sister, but it's OK! You're adopted! But at the folksy wedding, horse-riding brigands led by "the High Priest of the Ancient One" (Dakar) ride in and slaughter most everyone at the wedding except the bride and groom, making off with cute Sunya, and leaving Ator in the frustrated dust. Quick, Ator, time to harness that sexual angst training with a mysterious stranger named Griba (Edmund Purdom, in a terribly hacked-up Mongol warrior wig), the same one who brought you to your adopted parents so long ago! Meanwhile, Dakar makes his single digit army stand around for hours while he plays with his pet tarantula. Oh yes, Ator's travels will be fraught with sun-dappled danger, such as when he's caught by Amazons and forced to breed with a hot warrior named Roon (Sabrina Siani, who is in nearly every early-80s Italian post-Conan sword and sorcery film) and seduced by a foxy witch (Laura Gemser). What other sexy challenges will he face en route to his destiny as killer of the Ancient One (aka a giant spider)? 

Maybe it's his languid sexually uninhibited postures, the dreamy look in his eyes, the tastefully provocative fur loincloth, his golden toned skin and flowing 70s metal hair and copper/gold chest plate, but whatever, Miles O'Keefe cools the brow as Ator, the Fighting Eagle.  To paraphrase Murray Ballstein in Zoolander, he's dumb as a stump, but I love him. That love is important with the bad movies I keep on my emergency 'speed dial.' In order to make that hallowed list, everything must be right, that means no caged or abused animals, 80s perms, tight hair buns, tacky Roman-style bangs, act of courtly treachery, broad comic relief stooging, narcissistic male leads, fake breasts, tacky colors, realistic screaming or convincing torture. A tough order but Ator delivers on the lack of all those things and so much more. 

Everything about it hits me just right: D'Amato's cinematographic palette of purples, golds, and yellows; the rumbling timpani, Jerry Goldsmith-style piping and occasionally Wagnerian brass of Carlo Maria Cordio's subtly soaring score; the relatively short time frame; the long flowing wigs, golden skin, and cute fur boots and wrist bands on the young leads; the right lack of self awareness or narrative urgency; the endearingly clumsy fights (no stunt men were harmed--or even, apparently, employed); the clevery use of shadows and reflections--it all serves to put me in a calm and happy state. Squarely in a bloodless PG camp, somehow its lack of nudity and sex makes everything paradoxically sexier, more alive with a kind of erotic haziness. (1)



Stabbing, the easy way.
My affection for this all may have something to do with age and nostalgia so your mileage may vary. I don't have any kids but this movie makes me feel like I have grandkids, and they've made this on super-8mm and I'm watching it every night after dinner. My childhood friend Alan and I would screen our violent Conan homages for his grandparents and they never got tired of projecting them again and again. They adored us. I feel like I've become those same grandparents when I watch Ator, I feel the same indulgent pride, like Miles and D'Amato are my grandchildren and Ator was filmed in the park across the street and so all its flaws and limitations are just fine, part of its folk art/outsider art tradition. Take the stabbing scene at left, for example -- you can tell O'Keefe is stabbing behind the stuntman bad guy rather than through him, and somehow that makes it adorable. It has that same dunderheaded innocence. For example, though it's implied a long journey is underway the travelers never seem to need to get anywhere, and indeed double back over some stretches of where they've been (it looks like a relatively well-manicured park, replete with stone walkways and artificial waterfalls). 


But even all that doesn't totally begin to explain the appeal, the pull of Ator. A great example of it I think can be found in the two scenes of O'Keefe's resting a goblet on or near his genitals (above), splaying his legs out, when sitting, as if trying to get some air flow to his balls or obliging a waiting-in-the-wings. In your average 80s sex comedy this laid guy pose might be done by some loathsome frat boy with a plastic beer cup, and it would be rapey-vile instead of sexy-cool. The difference is between wanting/inviting vs. muscle memory of having. In short, Ator/O'Keefe seems like a very laid guy (always consensual, and usually instigated by the woman) and too naive and young to become a dick about it  Rumor has it that D'Amato was routinely frustrated with O'Keefe's continued listlessness during the shoot, but he was probably just sexually exhausted! No blood flow getting to his brain. What guy can't relate to that in the age of Cialis for daily use? To me he's at the perfect "low" setting for this kind of affair, and he even has a good (familiar-voiced) actor doing the dubbing who manages to inject just the right note of deadpan knowningness to every cliche'd line ("First I must complete... what I was born to do.") without crossing over into camp.

I think the appeal for me might lie in this sense of Edenic pre-sexual sexy cool. Any young boy knows the pain of those long years of childhood when you're caught between the pangs of sexual awakening and the maturity to understand why it's happening and what to do about it. Until puberty there is no outlet for it so sex is tied up with going to the bathroom (what Freud calls the anal phase). There's no chance of succor, no real idea how even to achieve it, thus fantasizing in bed at night has a sweet masochistic torturous edge. It's all about spanking and being each other's horses, or dogs, or slaves led around on leashes (at least it was for me growing up trying to seduce my babysitters). It's that prepubescent sexuality that fuels Ator. No one ever has any sex and as a result the whole thing falls into a hazy erotic miasma.  Instead of mating as she's supposed to, Roon teams up with him (he reminds her there's lots of treasure in the tomb of the Ancient One and she's very greedy). But the pair have barely begun to playfully shoot arrows at each other before D'Amato regular Laura Gemser as a horned enchantress lures Ator away, drugging him with another goblet at his crotch. Roon spies his goblet resting from a hole in the roof and sends their pet bear cub through a crack in the rocks to run a Toto-style cockblock. And so, again and again, sex never happens but almost happens --with Ator fought over as an object being used for sex and seed, always too languid and reposed to resist, preferring to just rest his flagon near his pelted crotch as if a grail light for wandering maidens. Not to mention, Ator plans to marry his own sister (even before knowing he was adopted) -- their early scenes together pulse with a yearning primal energy, of the sort I imagine only opposite gendered twins might repress from their polymorphous childhood. In other words, it's the allure vs. the follow-through. The Eden I seek to escape the Oscars with exists only in the delay of gratification, the fairy bower of erotic inertia.  

Like all good D'Amato movies, a close analysis reveals just how truly fucked up this all is. Michele Soavi was an uncredited co-writer and I'm guessing he maybe helped keep a kind of surrealist lid off things. Surely his absence is felt in the later sequels. The weird non-erotic eroticism vanishes altogether. 

Lastly, there's something about the look and feel of the film that reminds me the smell of 1980s Grateful Dead tour. Watching it I smell the mix of patchouli, unwashed bodies, hashish and sizzling meat and charcoal, all mixed together. One cheap acid that smell opened my 21 year-old third eye like a burning ember in the center of my forehead. Maybe you know it too? The earthy complexity of fire, roasting meat, bodies, earth and ancient perfumes commingling to tap into something ancient, spreading into past lives, helping you feel connected to the lives around you, deeply aware of gravity and the earth's rotation in the stas. The sound of the sizzling of a tailgate grill cracking open kundalini serpent eggs up your serpent spine --it's all there in Sabrina Siani's gleaming light-blonde princess wig, the dusty purplish cave walls, the big googly eyes of the giant black fur covered spider hiding in the columns on the hill, the shadow Ator convincingly sword fights with, the shiny mirror flashes, the long dark hair of the Ramones-evoking blind blacksmiths and warriors of Roon and Ator fight, in Cordio's grounding timpani and Wagnerian crescendos, in the gorgeous but unfussy cinematography (by D'Amato himself, a master cinematographer up there with Bava and Sergio Salvati when he applies himself), the fog-enshrouded zombie scene that goes nowhere, the Zeppelin wigs, the nicely small cast, the endearingly clunky violence, the cute black fur boots on Ritza Brown, the golden smooth limbs of Sabrina Siani, the horned crown of Gemser, and every strand of oversized clothesline web. 

ATOR 2: THE BLADE MASTER
(1982) Dir. Joe D'Amato 
*

We know we're in trouble from the get-to: the opening stretch is clearly from another movie, perhaps one D'Amato was starting to shoot, called Cave Dewellers (when Italians weren't ripping Conan in the early 80s they were ripping Quest for Fire, a big hit in Europe). He dropped that idea upon learning a Conan. sequel was in the works, and set about making his own Ator sequel because that's what Italian exploitation heroes do, they don't wait to imitate something after it's a big hit, they find out what's in production and venture as to what will be a hit, so they have a similar movie finished and ready to go at the same time. It's genius when it works, but when it doesn't.... 

To add running time, D'Amato keeps the cave men intro anyway (and even the US release is called "Cave Dwellers"), then eats up another reel of running 'previously on Ator' footage from the first film, taking care to omit ALL of the female characters. Didn't D'Amato suspect there were numerous women in Conan the Destroyer in addition to the requisite jailbait princess? Destroyer had Venessa Redgrave as a magical villainess and Grace Jones as a wild warrior! Actually Conan the Destroyer came out in 1984, and Blade Master is credited as from 1982 on imdb. WTF?

Gone too is Ator's innocence. He's  no longer the once blank barbarian slate who just wantsed to marry his comely sister and live a peaceful life in the country set to kickass pop ballad as they ran off in a freeze frame toward Edenic tomorrows. Now Sunya is forgotten and Ator is a combination Lone Ranger / Batman and Obi Wan Kenobi, training alone in his cave with his faithful Asian sidekick Thong. I can presume the reason Ator lives in a cave, and the king/wizard and his daughter live in a cave, and the bad guys hang out in a cave, is that D'Amato had reserved those caves for Cave Dweller and there was no refunds. So Ator and Thong read giant books and draw each other lifting weights in the mirror, you know, guy stuff. He now knows about herbs and how to make explosives from what's lying around in the walls of his cave. And women have no place in his life, even as drinking partners. 

Gone too, his glorious Zeppelin hair. Now, as befitting sanctimonious zen student, he has appropriated a Japanese style samurai headband / top knot.  

Gone too--unless there's a nice Blu-ray out there somewhere in Asia or Germany or something--D'Amato's usual peerless cinematography. Those original's dusky Frazetta-esque interiors and dappled green park exteriors have been replaced by a scrubland and grunge, probably due to never having come out on a remastered DVD or Blu-ray. The copy I saw (on Youtube) is a pan and scan (presumably) VHS tape transfer which does it no favors. We also miss a cool pop song to play over the end credits, and a score as fun and rich in Wagnerian brass and timpani. 

So, the pointless cave man intro and 'previously on Ator' scenes over with, the women excised from history (just like in the bible), we now learn that Ator's old mentor has in his possession of the "Geometric Nucleus" and Zor wants it, so where is it? Mila (Lisa Foster) the mentor's comely daughter must find Ator, now retreated from the world of men! To find him, he tells her, she must travel until so far "it seems that nature itself declines to follow you on your journey. Then you will have reached the land of Ator." Like nature itself, we may be also thinking of declining, but for love of the first film, perseverance! Thong, my sandals!

With her vaguely nerdy informal accessible vibe; Lisa Foster takes her role as Mila seriously enough that she helps balance out the blandness around her; her deep black eyeliner and black headband, straight shoulder length dark blonde hair and black dress on pale skin makes a nice complimentary contrast that pops against the washed out and muddy analog mise-en-scene. Then again, she's Canadian, so kind of too balanced and nice to deliver that wild sexy-dangerous edge of someone like Sabrina Siani or Laura Gemser. You can't have everything. At least she's got that popping eyeliner. And though it's nice to see some diversity, Ator's shadowy Asian partner Thong (Kiro Wehara) barely registers as anything more than 'Asian' and the sudden detour into Japanese-ness in Ator's whole schtick is odd and makes no sense. Where the hell are they? Some of the foes they run into look like they just rode off the set of Kurosawa's Ran. Apparently they were working with no script, just kind of coming up with ideas, and it shows. They never really decide if they are in feudal Japan or the dawn of history. And it shows. 

So with Ator a bore, Thong a silent cliche, and Mila nice but bland, it's a good thing they've got wondrously fey Brit David Brandon (left, with Foster) as the bad guy Zor. With his Vlad the Impaler facial hair and a giant Black Swan helmet, he's like a mid-80s fusion of Mick Jagger and David Warbeck. I love Brandon as the fey director in Michele Soavi's Stagefright; black-eyed Ariel in Derek Jarman's Jubilee; the tortured priest in Claudio Fragasso's Beyond Darkness (not to be confused with D'Amato's Beyond the Darkness); and even a werewolf aesthete in Avi Nesher's She. Too bad in Blade Master his lovely face is hidden behind the oversize black wig and mustache. That's his voice though, and he's serving charm and catlike menace. Enduring his old mentor's put-downs ("Patience is a virtue found only in the strong") with a fey grace ("you do amuse me") he's way more fun and easygoing than the cranky killjoys he's up against.

Alas, aside from some half-hearted cave-set battles, including a listless attempt at fighting with invisible warriors (I would have loved to be behind the scenes for that day), most of the lazily-choreographed fights are outdoors; a lot of time and energy is wasted on a side plot wherein Ator tries to convince villagers to fight back against the cannibal ravagers that demand monthly human sacrifice (the old conveniently decide to sacrifice their young), only to wind up drugged by some wine and tied to a pole, forced to watch as these town elders are (deservedly) massacred anyway by Zor and his goons (shades of Dogville). "Your eagerness for good deeds has betrayed you, Ator!," Zor chides back at yet another cave. 

This all leads to the best/worst interlude in the movie, one of only a handful of legit bad movie moments, though even it is undone by excessive bad screaming. Ator and friends are brought to the sacred cave or something where the prisoners from the village are thrown one by one into a pit with about six real snakes and one huge coil of thick rubber hosing meant to be a giant snake. The female victims have to hide in a corner and scream for hours as the life-size snakes avoid them on the other side of the pit. Watching these poor girls pretend to be scared and devoured by a couple of half-asleep boa constrictors would be hilarious, as would the dialogue of the bad guys ("And now, the fourth victim to appease our omnipotent god.") but the welcome sounds of snake hissing and a distant growling noise is also contrasted with feminine half-hearted screams that go on and on until the giant snake finally wakes up. By then Ator and the princess are also in the pit and a wondrous grimy time is had by all.  Except us, of course, since the scene is so dark we can barely see the outline of this marvelous snake. Was it so bad that D'Amato realized he had to keep it totally obscured by darkness or is this just the result of the fuzzy transfer? Will we ever know?  Then, because maybe O'Keefe got one for Christmas, Ator is suddenly hang gliding. He's dropping bombs on Zor's fortress. Oy! It would be a great anachronistic WGAF mic-drop moment except it goes on waaayy too long. Then, at the end, he can't hang out with this cute Canuck as he's got to escort that dumb nucleus safely into no man's land where it mushroom clouds our way to a more hopeful tomorrow. 

And Ator? I guess he'll be ready whenever outlaws rule the west once again. We don't see him after he leaves with the bomb. The narrator has to fill us in over a nice mushroom coud. I guess if trouble comes again we just got to look where nature itself wisely declines to follow. 

It's the pits, but if anyone knows of a good Blu-ray import or something give me a shout out. I can only find one dubbed in Hungarian with no subtitles. Maybe I'm better off without one, maybe the world just isn't ready. 

ATOR 3: THE IRON WARRIOR
(1987) Dir. Alfonso Brecia
***1/3

"Eternity.... passes... quickly" 

Continuity is left miles behind, as is Joe D'Amato, in the third ATOR film, 1987's The Iron Warrior. Alfonso Star Odyssey Brescia has stepped in as director to save the series from the awful dregs that was Blade Master. Actually there is almost no resemblance to the previous two films at all, other than snatches of Cordio's score, O'Keefe and the name ATOR (which isn't even in the onscreen title). What we get instead is more like an occult matriarchy's high fashion take on a fairy tale on the island of Malta. Recently released on a spiffy Blu-ray, with glistening cinematography showing off every detail of the beautiful Maltese scenery and the eye-popping contrast of bright red and green haute couture against the azure oceans and milky cliiffs. Artsy tableaux take precedence over continuity, evoking some 80s high-end perfume ad ("Ator- the new fragrance by L'Oréal"). People emerge from swimming across the sea but their clothes are dry when they come out. Dresses and hair styles change color from shot-to-shot. The wind allows the oversize (80s, remember) dresses and oil rags to flutter evocatively, providing as well a good excuse for scarves over the actor's mouths allowing for easy substitution of stunt doubles. 

Just to add to the challenge of discerning the plot, the sound mixer hit upon the happy idea of running the whole soundtrack through what sounds just like my old guitar flanger. Sword swings sound like jets; horse hooves like gun shots fired in an echo chamber; the roar of the ocean wind sounds like a swarm of drunken bees, drowning out most of the opening voiceover narration and any dialogue not shouted. Composer Carlo Mario Cordio (he's back in form!) underscores certain emotional moments with Morriconey minor key schmaltz, and over-scores bigger battles with unfortunate major key John Williams Raider of the Lost Ark-style pomp. Actually, all the best passages of music are those returning from the first film. But all the Italian composers steal from themselves as well as each other. 

Luckily being able to hear doesn't matter because it looks marvelous. Every image is a poem. Witches pose in silhouette against boiling moons (below) issuing directions from beyond ("Ator - you will have to manage on your own.") Princesses and handmaidens frolic like a merry fauns by the colonnade. In some post-modern black box theater, beyond space and time, three color coded witches/fates chant the sins of the evil witch Phaedra (imprisoned in a pair of revolving red hula hoops) via multimedia rear screen projection (as if the Wooster Group was making a multimedia disco Macbeth). Ator poses and practices his mighty sword in soaring helicopter shots atop a white cliff overlooking the sea. Ator, you're needed once again!



Taking motifs from Sleeping Beauty, as well as Macbeth, ancient Greek tragedies, and Clash of the Titans, we get Phaedra, a wild red-haired bad older witch (a hammy Elizabeth Kaza, all wild gleaming eyes and mocking movements) being imprisoned in glowing red hula hoops for 18 years after stealing Ator's kid brother to use in her evil deeds. When released, she's allowed to once more sway events on the mortal plane. Lickily Ator is all grown up and ready. The good witch, Deeva (Iris Peynado, Fred Williamson's pale blue-eyed love interest in Warriors of the Wasteland) alerts Ator to the adventure ahead like a girl dusting off an old action figure for use in her latest bedroom adventure. Phaedra's boy--his brother--now commands all things iron! He's the IRON WARRIOR.  And if e'er Ator was "the Son of Torin" (as in ATOR 1) or an ascetic student of ancient samurai ways (ATOR 2), now he's neither. On the other hand, we're never sure just what he is, other than... a hero. 

Furthering the post-modern disconnect, there's a feeling of all eras going on at once as Brescia makes use of Malta's unique scenery and architecture, notably "Sweethaven," a huge, still-standing and very quirky and quaintly ramshackle cliffside fishing village left over from Altman's 1980 musical Popeye (it's now a still-standing amusement park - but they only celebrate Popeye there, not Ator, which is a shame). Seeing Ator hide from clattering horsemen under a dusty Sweethaven Chinese laundry store window makes one feel like he's wandered into a spaghetti western. We also get rope bridge crossings that look pretty real and dangerous, tunnels, caverns, and cliffs towering above the glowing blue ocean, and even a brick castle replete with pane windows, sewer gratings, and probably trash cans and souvenir shops just off camera. . Compared to the first two films with their easygoing ambling, Iron Warrior seems far more ambitious, strange (lots of weird demented dream sequences and magical illusions) and pretty to look at han one might expect for a sequel to what was an impoverished sub-Conan to start with.    


There's also a strange gender-bent aspect about O'Keefe's Ator now. When I first saw him in a profile close-up (above)- with his hair pulled back in tight, small braids, a dangling thin straight earring, sharply slanted high cheekbones, straight graceful neck, all lightly dabbed in make-up with that serious expression, he reminded me of an androgynously striking girl I knew in high school. And I like that he seems to embrace it. If, in the first film he conveyed a languid innocence and earnestness that was refreshing, like the good looking kid with all the Zeppelin albums who was still nice to the nerds, and if, in the scond one, he was dour, grimy and self-important (his vegan years?), now he's grown up and developed a genial collegiate knowingness which suits the off-Broadway Vogue-ry on display. 
Three faces of Ator! 


He and Jenna--the endangered princess he rescues--have a very sexy low-key chemistry that makes even dialogue like: "Is the king in danger?" / "Yes, Ator,"  seem like whispery come-ons. 


Taken all in all, I love most everything about this movie but with several glaring caveats: aside from the high fashion-emulating costumes, hair and make-up. The cherry red oversize kaftan princess Jenna (Savina Gersak) wears is fine when it's billowing in the Malta wind, but strikes one as très gauche when worn at midnight dungeon soirees, especially with her hair pulled up tight in that hideoys fantail top knot (above) giving her a kind of radis récolté look most at odds with all the flowing of her garments (and the one magenta eyebrow smacks of teenage desperation). The flowing hair metal locks of "Ah-tor" meanwhile have similarly been symbolically castrated into a reverse dread center braid (though a big improvement after his greasy samurai top knot in Blade Master), his signature gong-shaped chest plate now obscured with an array of tattered garage floor oil cloth furs flung over football shoulder pads (ugh, the 80s). Man, it's a shame as their long hair blowing in the Malta winds would have been sick! 

Maybe the wind had something to do with it. Did it get in your hair, Ator? At one point the Iron Warrior's signature long red scarf blows up over his eyes and Ator has to patiently halt their to-the-death sword fight so he can move it. In several scenes the wind compels them to wear scarves over their mouths, which makes it easier to sub in a stuntman when needed. Suddenly Ator can really fight and zips through the slow-mo bad guys so fast the climactic fight is over in a few seconds, and he still finds time to show off an array of warrior poses. Then, it's back to normal, O'Keefe can hold a sword and be can swing it. Period. When it's time to do some moves, put on the scarf! 

check out the witch in the middle, eating... something


Unlike the first two films, magic, dreams, and hallucinations reign supreme. The Iron Warrior is so named because he can float, disappear, and make spears stick out horizontally from the wall, and even make swords appear in his hand should he lose them, and rise to the top of the cliff behind Jenna he's some kind crazy William Castle spook show phantom. And evil Phaedra has the power to assume any form, so can change ages (as young Phaedra she's played by Tiziana Altieri and she looks a bit like Billie Eilish (above) crossed with Natasha Leggero and is probably cast because she looks like the hot witch (Cassandra Gava) in Conan. And even look like her rival, or the princess herself, if she chooses. When she starts eating ribs while gyrating pantsless, staring mockingly into the camera, surrounded by revelers in tacky red face scarves and owl skin should pads and other costumes that seem rejected from The Wiz, I was in weird dream heaven. Here's a typical progression: Phaedra turns into her younger sexy self, and lets herself be chased by a bunch of evil horsemen while Ator is practicing nearby. He instantly changes armor and hair style and rushes to her rescue. Before you can say don't fall for it, Ator, he's passed naked out in her bed and she's getting dressed turning back into her old witchy self and setting the place on fire. The voice of Deeva the good witch (crystal-eyed Iris Peynado) from beyond wakes him up saying "She for whom you are fated, needs you now"  and off he goes to one of Cordio's tumbling synth timpani rolls as Jenna lies atop a stone bed on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean with a magic sword posed over her neck as a bunch of skull faced jawas bang rocks around her stone altar bed.  Ator chases them off! Iron Warrior appears by floating up from below the cliff!  They tussle! An open smoke pot blows in the ocean wind behind them they duel atop the cliffs! Suddenly the Iron Warrior vanishes and Ator stabs a pile of his clothes. Phaedra laughs from someplace outside of space and time. Now Jenna and Ator are wandering through the woods at magic hour as the setting sun sets. All this happens in about two minutes!

The dialogue, shouted over the wind, is great throughout, especially when Phaedra flubs a line, shouting "you are no--you areno match for me, Ator!" at one point. In nine times out of nine, they'd retake that or edit it out or redub it, but the fact it stays in gives me no small amount of happiness, as does the way the whispering oracle statue Ator and Jenna visit is impossible to hear it over the flangered wind. Later a giant rolling tone ball like in Raiders of the Lost Ark chases her, and then a different one chases Ator, as if they're all in a giant pinball game and they eventually collide. Every time anything violent or cool happens things slow down to slow mo and the sound gets flanger-modulated, which rocks my world no end. 



Brescia keeps the action and scenery humming. All the boring stuff and--after the opening narration which we can't hear anyway-- narration and plot continuity are gleefully stripped away and everything is whittled down a series of stunning tableaux vivant. Every shot is like a fashion spread still by someone who didn't want to pay for hair spray. Compared to the dull by-the-motions chore of the Blade Master the amount of effort lavished here restores one's faith in the Ator juggernaut. So what if there's no rhyme or reason to who these four masked riders are or why they're riding away with Jenna's splayed limbs tied between them like a flying draw and quarter. Good thing for Ator all these spears just hanging there along the chase route so Ator can grab and throw them as he goes. It almost seems like some kind of race course set up just for him to practice his riding and throwing. Don't think about it. Just endure Coridio's hackneyed majestic action orchestration and try not to roll your eyes. It'll be over soon. 


A feminist matriarchal thread runs from text to subtext. For example, at the end, the color-coded witches enclave talk about how Ator belongs to Jenna now. There's never a thought of Jenna belonging to Ator! And not to spoil things but this time Ator isn't getting away to go back to no cave. In a great penultimate shot we see her face as she embraces Ator (his back to us), looking dead at the camera with an "I got him now" kind of wicked smile. The inference she's actually Phaedra in disguise is instantly put to rest by the witches rhyming away like a Greek chorus in their multimedia black box theater beyond space and time, with Phaedra immobilized once again in her revolving red hula hoop prison. The implication can only be Jenna herself is sort of evil, as all women must be apparently, when ensnaring wandering faux-Ronin to their bosom clutches when all they wants to do is get back to showing off their swords in the mirror. 

-----

Ator's whole origin would change yet again for a fourth in the series, also knowns as QUEST FOR THE MIGHT SWORD (1988) with D'Amato returning to direct but O'Keefe inexplicably replaced by beefy Meatloaf-meets-Roddy Piper-esque Eric Allen Kramer. This new Ator seems to  have drunk seventy thousand beers too many, maybe hanging out at Chicago ale houses, gaining about six inches of height, a hundred ponds of beef ("like he's ten years out of military service and eating his way through PTSD" notes Cheapsteak). He now has long light blonde hair, and a throne, which he quickly loses through one too many ill-advised trials by combat much to the horror of wife and son. 

He dies, deservedly, and mom and his child end up on the run as their kingdom is claimed by the challenger, who is evil of course. The pursued mom decides to leave Ator Jr. with an ugly troll in order to get a magic ring or something like that. The troll, a true douchebag kind of anti-Yoda drugs her on her way out, rapes her, blows her mind, and sends her out as a sex slave, or something while young Ator grows up to, unfortunately, be played by Kramer, too. No offense meant to Kramer. I'm sure he'd be fine in his usual role as a bouncer or henchman but he's all wrong as either young or old Ator. Though it's nice to see that old Troll 2 mask trotted out again, yeesh! What an au pair mom has picked for her son! That's two terrible hiring choices in one film, one meta, one textual. Question is, when will Ator Jr. figure out how to steal the troll's magic sword or ring or whatever and free himself without getting caught in his ugly guardian's web of illusion? I don't know either. I can't get around Kramer's casting as the son too. I could buy Ator gone to seed as an older dad, but as the son he's twice as miscast. How did he even get this part? Did D'Amato see Roddy Piper starring in Carpenter's They Live (from the same year) and think beefy Chicago/Toronto-style guys were 'in' as leading men? That old troll must really know how to pull some magic strings.

And so... after 6+  months, my 12 Days of ED WOOD CONCLUDED! Yer welcome. 

NOTES:
1. By now, with all the smash-cut rutting on AMC, and HBO ("HBO, where foreplay is forgotten!"), sex onscreen is no longer forbidden, and therefore not spicy. In ATOR it's always about to happen, but something prevents it, just like in dreams. 

Recent Favorites: Ten Weird Cinema Discoveries

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Don't panic, but picking out a movie to watch is becoming ever more impossible. No filmmaker, artist or writer can help but be dismayed by the internet's total everything all the time availability. With hundreds more movies coming out every month and none of older stuff ever disappearing, it's harder and harder to find choice nuggets since it's easy to close yourself off to new sensations. Thus content aggregators zero in on our specific tastes and so our tastes shrink instead of widen. Tubi chooses for me an array of 30s-80s horror and science fiction. And I have to obey --because otherwise I will be drowned in options. Just the number of independent SOV outsider horror films alone could send even the most open-minded film critics running screaming into the night from despair.

When I was working as a film critic I rarely got to pick my assignments; as a result, I had to see a lot of stuff I'd never watch in a million years on my own. I covered everything from cliche-ridden gay romcoms like Big Eden  to weird but effective black family-aimed spiritual comedic-soaps like Medea's Family Reunion. As a result my horizons were expanded far beyond my comfort zone. I wouldn't watch any of those movies today on my own, not ever, especially not in a theater or screening room where I was compelled to actually pay attention. Nonetheless, with the exception of Alexander Sukorov's closeted steam fantasia Father and Son (2003) and the the Ned Flanders-friendly The Pirates who Don't do Anything: A Veggie Tales Movie (2008), I'm glad I saw them. 


But that job is done; my comfort zone has gotten very narrow. Now if something doesn't grab me from the get-go, I stop watching. With a thousand channels, and hundreds of thousands of movies on each one why would I waste time with something aimed at a different demographic? Or something that has kids, animal abuse, pedantic Christian messaging, convincing torture scenes, depressing truths, fake breasts, snickering frat boys, or tacky 80s perms? Or anything other than shot on 35mm and given a solid HD translation with vivid colors? Not on my watch... list! Life's too damn short.

Yet the long hunt is worth it when I finally strike gold--stuff my aggregator's and I both like. Viola! 

1. WOMAN CHASING THE BUTTERFLY OF DEATH
(1978) Dir. Kim Ki-young
via Mondo Macabro (Korean - with subtitles)

Here at Acidemic we have a yen for legit weird films but they got to be weird for a purpose. Sometimes weirdness is a specific code used to get critiques of Catholic or Communist ideologies past their home country's censors (i.e. the films of Bunuel or Parajanov); sometimes weirdness is just arch intellectual posturing (some Godard, Robbe-Grillet, Resnais, Carax) or merely a callow showcase for macabre art direction and effects (Burton, Jeunet). Sometimes weirdness translates to shamanic archetypes straight from the unconscious, captured on film prior to any conscious structuring (Jodorowsky, Lynch, Zulawski Rollin), that's the kind I love - and then sometimes there's Kim Ki-young's Woman Chasing the Butterfly of Death-- it's all those weirds and none of them, a surreal meditation on death and the eternal self that's at quietly absurdist, terrifying, and droll, resisting with ease any attempt to categorize or predict the origin or direction of its next offense--that kind of cinematic experience I'll give my steel pot to any day, to quote Gene Evans as Sgt. Zack. 

A man begins a long and strange odyssey by accidentally drinking poison with a girl he meets at a park while chasing an elusive and strange butterfly. Miraculously he doesn't die, but she does, so now the cops think he killed her, or was hallucinating. A wandering bookseller senses our hero's near brush with death and appoints himself his guru, announcing defeating death can be done through will alone. Our hero isn't interested. Even after he dies, the bookseller keeps hounding him. An ancient skeleton stolen from a huge cavern tourist area wills itself into flesh and become his cannibal demon lover. It turns out the daughter of his soon-to-be archeologist mentor/employer was going to drink the poison with that dead girl from the park but was late, and now is jealous and pissed our hero took her place and that now she'll have to die alone. She too collects butterflies (transfiguration's ultimate symbol!). They're pinned all over her room, and he's next. This club has everything: disembodied heads blow out birthday candles, excavators as assassination weapons; vicious archeologists fighting over a primitive man's skull, and gangster assassins. It all doesn't add up to much cumulative effect but then again neither did Holy Mountain, or Twin Peaks. It's the ride not the destination, because there's only ever really one destination, isn't there? No point arriving at it any time soon if you can avoid it.

The Mondo Macabro transfer has a kind of rough-around-the-gills look that doesn't do it much favors, but let's not ask for the wound, we have the scars. 

2. YOKAI MONSTERS: SPOOK WARFARE
Aka (THE GREAT YOKAI WAR)
(1968) Dir. Yoshiyuki Kuroda
via Arrow streaming (in Japanese with English subtitles)

A wondrous Arrow release this year has been the 60s Yokai Monsters trilogy (plus a CGI-using Takeshi Miike remake). Of the three original films, this one is easily the best and the only one with a nonhuman villain. Like the similar but much less fun Giant Majin trilogy, the Yokai films are all set in small rural period piece Japanese villages where local peasants are subject to the cruel whims of human oppressors, until weird folk legend monsters finally show up and kick bad guy ass. The oppression parts can get pretty manipulative, especially with the Maijin series--how much more suffering can these peasants endure until that pokey statue finally lumbers into action for the unsatisfying pay-off (at a certain level of prolonged abuse, no mere stepping on by a big stone giant is sufficient catharsis). The Yokai are more child-friendly, to a point, and scatter monster vengeance bits throughout, but only Spook Warfare--the second in the Yokai series--stacks the deck more evenly, using an ancient Babylonian vampire monster who can assume any form--and even split himself into numerous different human forms via vampire bites--instead of a cruel human landlord, gangster, or tyrant for a villain. The resulting all out brawl between this powerful demon and 100 or so different folk monsters is like if the residents of the Star Wars cantina all went over to somebody's backyard pool after closing time to drink more beers and fight the monster from A Chinese Ghost Story. Like all the best spooky movies, it occurs mostly at single night, in beautifully-lit soundstage gardens and eerie graveyards, with moody low end ominousness pulsing in the score (courtesy Sai Ikeno). It would be fine choice for brave children, never talking down to them and directly threatening them at the same time (as the vampire villain especially loves to drink their virgin blood), and "adult" kaiju fans will find plenty to groove to. 

Lastly, the psychedelic warriors amongst you just need to know a wild umbrella monster with a very long tongue in appears the movie--you're not hallucinating. It's a real Japanese folktale spirit called a kasa-obake) and the way it bounces around with its wild eye and obscene tongue just may give you one one of those coveted acid flashbacks we're always hearing about but--for me at least--have never actually occurred. Either way, with so many other ghosts and goblins--even if they're more or less actors in suits-- Spook Warfare will make you rethink your lifestyle choices, in the best of ways.


. 3. EYES OF FIRE
(1983) Dir. Avery Crounse
Severin via Shutter  (English)

The awesome and otherworldly and long-unavailable (excepts as a chopped-up HBO cut or cropped old VHS) period piece is one of the real surprises of the year (coming in as part of Severin's unmissable folk horror collection All the Haunts be Ours). It's horror-adventure period piece magical realism along the same general plot and time frame as The Witch --i.e. late-1600s America, when the wilderness was still largely the domain only of Native Americans, trappers, a few British or French military-maintained outposts, wandering fur traders, and small, remote religiously uptight enclave, and--of course--wild witches and shamanic tree spirits roaming unchecked in the woods. As with The Witch, we have a an iconoclastic patrariach--in this case an itinerant preacher who takes up with the wife of a long-absent fur trader and her gaggle of kids. They end up needing to escape downriver when the town tries to hang a redheaded girl stepchild just because she knows herbology and how to speak with the trees. Sailing on a wooden raft, shot at by Native Americans, they end up finding a place of their own by setting up shop in a patch of woods the local tribes fear to tread, and--it turns out--quite rightly. 

  
See, it's haunted by a malicious soul collecting tree spirit magus who is soon sucking them all down to his web of interlocked roots and shroom filaments. Gradually the survivors barricade themselves into their fort walls defending against the tribes and even an evil changeling shuttled into their midst that the preacher takes as his own. The preacher himself gradually goes plum loco in an Aguirre thinking he's Col. Kurtz but actually being Royal Dano in There Will be Blood kind of way. The kids stand fast, under the protective wing of the barefoot wild-haired dirt-eating, herb-picking redhead in their midst. With great use made of the misty forest and a cockeyed Badlands-style child narration--as the story is told to the incredulous French officer (Mike Genovese)--highlight include all the spirts embedded in slimy grey tree bark; the running around and magically enabling gang of previous victims now ghost slaves glowing red, the blowing leaves and wild shamanic fights; the vanishing into the mist; and a bizarre and the sudden wink of an ending that left me, for one, feeling bullish about the natural world again.

4. THE MURDER MANSION
(1972) Dir. Francisco Lara Polop
via Arrow (in Spanish with English subtitles)

Another all-in-a-single dark and foggy night wild ride movie, my favorite kind of spook show (ala The Old Dark House, The Black RavenHouse on Haunted Hill, Cat and the Canary, andSomething Creeping in the Dark.) In a rather ingeniously-edited overlapping open stretch along the late afternoon, we follow a pretty hitchhiker (Lisa Leonardi), a young motorcyclist, and an array of cars full of interlocked rich connivers and their spouses along a winding one country road through and along a moody Spanish tree-lined woods and countryside. They soon all get lost in the rural Spanish fog so seek shelter at the same gloomy mansion owned by creepy-sexy Evelyn Stewart (Persephone in Bava's unmissable Hercules in the Haunted World) in a town gone empty and uninhabited after a lot of rumors about vampires. Analía Gadé is the dissolute redhead heiress who is probably being driven mad by the ghost of a brutish glowing red eyed chauffeur and a the old severed head in the closet gag (a shout out perhaps to House on Haunted Hill!), Figuring out the twist-upon-twist ending in advance needn't diminish the shivery pleasures to be found, especially now that it looks so damned good (thanks to an Arrow clean-up). Besides, after the expected twists come several more. They don't call it Murder Mansion for nothing. 

5. THE ZOMBIE WALKS
 ("Im Banne des Unheimlichen")
(1968) Alfred Vohrer
Youtube (in German with English subtitles)

This beautifully color-restored HD German film--now seeable on Youtube with English subtitles! probably misses a lot of potential viewers because of its misleading American release title sounding too much like other films (and probably it was in a badly cropped print, with bad dubbing). But those days are about to change! Turns out, there are about three million Edgar Wallace adaptations from Germany from the 60s-70s, most from director Alfred Vohrer and featuring a sputtering Col. Klink-style Scotland Yard chief Sir Arthur (Hubert von Meyerinck) as comic relief, his capable little girlfriend assistant (this time Siw Mattson) and the handsome dashing lead detective Higgins (here Joachim Fuchsberger) dealing with, variously, supposedly dead people who may not be dead, masked killers, spooky fogbound estates, imperiled heiresses, mysterious criminal organizations and Bond-style escapes; the usually have an English language pop/rock theme song, color credits even if the film is in black-and-white, and a jazzy psychedelic look. Thanks to the folk hero Simon Bart bull they've been collected and subtitled into English on YouTube (see the list hier). 

As usual for Wallace films, the 'zombie' is probably not real, just a mysterious assailant in a glowing skull mask with glowing skeleton hand gloves who runs around offing people with that ultimate in Edgar Wallace murder weapons, a spring lauded scorpion ring laden with an undetectable poison. A scene of him attacking someone pulled over in the fog on the road--the fog itself and the green mask all aglow--is especially spooooky and fun, evoking Bava and the Batman at the same time. The cast are all either suspects, dead, or heroes, including Claude Farell is the intrepid young female reporter regularly getting to the crime scene mere seconds before Higgins. Wolfgang Keitling is a haunted aristocrat who inherited the estate from his brother (who's recently maybe killed in a suspicious plane crash). 

 Vying for the estate are competing charities his brother supported, including  a shady clinic operated by cold-eyed doctors and nurses (a Wallace staple), and a religious organization that tries to stop Higgins from examining the body of the supposedly dead brother.  There are plenty of suspects to go around: an evil nurse, a green-faced alcoholic grave digger; a priest and his evil looking right hand woman; a female author of a books about rare poisons; and a doctor who can't attest to his own whereabouts the night before. It's got the perfect blend of comic touches, all-in-a-night spook show momentum, stunning HD night photography, endless easy-to-follow plot twists, swirling fog, comedy, gloomy crypts, nightclubs,  Bava-esque deep gel colors and a fun Scooby Doo-style denouement that makes it just the right film to watch between Blood and Black Lace(1964) and The Ghoul (1933).

6. THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS
(1978) Dir. Enzo Castellari
Severin (in English and German)

Director Enzo Castellari sucks us in from the very beginning of this Dirty Dozen-inspired full bore over-the-top Italian WW2 action extravaganza. Like so many Italian imitations of American box office hits, it proves way more fun and faster moving than the original. Offering the same basic premise --a bunch of stockade-bound US soldiers vs. mostly anonymous Germans. Forgoing all the training montages, sneaking around, war games, brawls, lip service from arrogant generals, mission planning and carousing and anti-authoritarian posturing that ate up the first 2/3 of Aldrich's film, Castellari keeps his loose and in the moment. About five minutes in, a lucky shelling frees a group of prisoners on their way to the stockade. Boom! They decide wander through the war-torn landscape, hoping to find Switzerland and immunity. They end up teaming with an AWOL German Wermacht soldier (Raimund Harmstorf), accidentally wiping out a squad of Nazi-disguised Allied commandos, and then taking their place on a mission with the French or Belgian resistance to blow up a train carrying a Nazi rocket scientist and his new warhead aboard. So many explosions and guns! I started watching this more out of just searching around the web for a moment's distraction, and soon my childhood obsession with WW2 sparked right back up and I sucked down the whole thing like a desert wanderer sucks down a cold can of beer. How we would have loved this back in my tweenage war years if only we'd not been such snobs over post-sync sound and Italians in general. Well, it was worth waiting for (this would probably be much less effective on fullscreen VHS), all looking suave and majestic on HD widescreen. And man is it a bloody hilarious riot. All this, and Fred Williamson too! Count me in. 

7. THE LAST HUNTER
(1980) Dir. Antonio Margheriti
Code Red (in English)

I loved Bastards so much I found and followed up with this far different Margheriti war movie from just two years later. This time he's imitating Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, i.e. a much less popular war than the one fought in Inglorious. A decidedly odd but engaging epic, The Last Hunter stars everyone's favorite Brit, David Warbeck (The Beyond) as a combo Martin Sheen from Apocalypse Now and Robert De Niro in The Deer Hunter, but way cooler. After his crazy friend kills himself over his AWOL girlfriend at a Saigon bar, Warbeck is sent on a mission behind the lines to find and destroy a hidden Tokyo Rose/Axis Sally-style propaganda radio station operating somewhere upriver. A big twist at the end harkens it all back to the beginning and seriously jades our hero out so that the final shot eerily anticipates the big key image of Platoon Scrawny maniac John Steiner is the Col. Kilgore to Warbeck's Willard, holding shit down in a remote river outpost that's has a a snack machine and bar. Showing he's loco, Steiner's favorite music is his reel-to-reel of gunfire and explosions ("dig that beat!"). Tessa (Zombie) Farrow lends feminine presence meanwhile as the usual endangered but fearless photojournalist who's almost raped (Steiner's sex-starved soldiers "haven't seen a woman in months.") Luckily the crazy colonel distracts them by sending one of them across enemy lines to get him a cocoanut. Ah, the genius of command! 

This being an Italian movie, they're all soon besieged by attacking VC and NVA--bullets flying and people falling back into crates and through mud walls, and the crazy action resumes anew: gunboat explosions, lone survivor rescues, heroics, imprisonment in bamboo cages submerged in the rat-infested river (to get those Deer Hunter tokens) and of course, endless explosions. The climactic confrontation at the radio transmitter station makes this a sublime winner of disillusionment and pro-violence anti-sentiment. 


A big surprise here is how Riccardo Pallottini's cinematography makes the Philippine jungles look airy and crisp and inviting. Usually in films shot there the sky seems always white with a haze of solid cloud; the humidity makes everyone and everything seem shellacked and hazy with perspiration and gnats. I get sweaty and find it hard to breathe just watching 90% of movies shot there. That's not the case with The Last Hunter. The water looks fine, and the air is crisp as a new dollar bill. 

No surprise here is how cool, calm, and always with a sideways disbelieving smirk is our Warbeck. There's a reason he's so beloved of Italian genre film fans. A kind of a Cary Grant without the dandy feyness nixed with Pierce Brosnan without the Esquire vanity, all smothered in a "who the fuck are you kidding?" kind of a cock-eyed look that makes me wish he could be in every Italian action and horror film ever made. Of the ones he did, this is probably the best. It's certainly the best looking (I found it in HD floating around YouTube, but plan on getting the Blu-ray soon, cuz Code Red rawks.  

8. THE PEACOCK KING 
1988) Dir Ngai Choi Lam 
(DVD) in Chinese with English subtitles

Ngai Choi Lam doesn't waste any time or include any filler. We're plunged into the heady melange of a devil, his young daughter (Narumi Yasuda), and ancient curses destined to be fulfilled and the sky being blotted out by inky clouds of evil when she comes to her 16th (I think) birthday and opens the gates of Hell as foretold in the prophecy. There's no time to think twice or wonder why an animatronic dinosaurs exhibit is being set up in the midst of a grand opening department store--we know it's so the monsters can come alive and battle a pair of odd couple Buddhist disciples, separated at birth by their respective Zen masters, one from Japan (Hiroshi Mikami) and one from HK (Biao Yen), now there to save the soul of the devil girl. No need to wonder why they take her to an amusement park--it's so weird little touches like stop-motion animated little creatures hiding in the trash on the Hong Kong street are like shots of joy to the heart. So we have two separately trained young monks helping to turn Satan's little girl to the side of good before her key turning moment comes--at an amusement park! We're still reeling from how cool the dinosaur department store fight was and here we are climbing up a rollercoaster (for real) to rescue a person stuck up on the track.  

The only (minor) flaw I could find is perhaps that Lam is a bit too enamored of the special effects shots of a giant reptilian mouth emerging from a villain's bendable back, and the massive gates to Hell shooting up from the ground and slowly opening. Lam is so psyched for these two moments that they stretch on way too long and kill the momentum. The whole film seems to stand still while these effects slowly unfurl. But otherwise, from the get-go, it's a solid blast. HK's ultra sex symbol Gloria Yip is even along for the ride. Look out! In a lot of ways, Lam does what Tsui Hark does but better --less slapsticky and speed-addled/confusing, more fun and easy to follow, grabbing you from the get-go and never letting go. The only comparison I can think of how I felt watching this was the first time I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark, the perfect flow from grand set piece to grand set piece, never exhausting or confusing or boring,  is hard to do but Lam does it here, and also in the equally great THE SEVENTH CURSE!

9. TWO ORPHAN VAMPIRES
(1997) Dir. Jean Rollin
Severin / Kino-Cult - in French with English subtitles

No one who loves Jean Rollin will argue that in many ways he's not the greatest horror director -- but only he brings that dark, moody sense of kinky and uniquely French decadenceHe absorbed a great wealth of decadence and poetry as a child ("Story of the Eye"-author Georges Batailles was a family friend) and it meshes with the memory of his first kiss on the beach into a miasma of work that seems like the beautiful but macabre dreams of an absinthe-poisoned aesthete--classic vampire motifs, weird twin-Alice surreal imagery violent, sudden sex and death, and--of course--that same beach. Rollin fans know that beach very well. Expect a gory and fast-paced good time and expect in vain! But if you let the slow pace lull your mind into a receptive alpha state, his macabre Baudelaire / Corbière-esque poetic monologues--often waxed direct to camera by a deep-eyed beauty holding a skull--might just beam right into your subconscious-- and there's nowhere you'd rather it beam. This is especially true if he keeps his focus on his favorite archetypal image: two mysterious young vampire girls walking around old castles or graveyards in search of blood and adventure. And he has in just this in Two Orphan Vampires a pair of amazing actresses (Alexandra Pic et Isabelle Teboul) who have a great, wondrous rapport and a line of patter that perfectly encapsulates Rollin's oeuvre in a fun, almost playful way. Soaring on each other's wings of madness across numerous times and identities, they're more in the vein of Kate Winslet and. Melanie Lynskey in Heavenly Creatures than the usual, often mute, somewhat vacant Rollin heroines.  Scenes of them with their eyes glazed and Rollin's requisite big dopey hanging out of the mouth fangs are kind of dumb, but the rest is sublime. 

Rollin has never been comfortable with just wholeheartedly embracing the familiar vampire tropes, and here--instead of needing to sleep in their coffin to avoid sunlight-- these girls are totally blind by day, replete with canes and dark glasses but at night they come alive with delirious evil. It's an ingenious idea and I love that there are barely any men at all. Men are often either rapist crooks or effete dreamers in Rollin films, so when the two orphan girls are adopted by a widowed (?) businessman, we cringe--will he be abusive and/or unbearable? No, he's dutiful and often absent. His only crime is he shoots one of them by mistake after they're late coming home from one of their bloody wanderings. The closest thing to a villain in the film is a guy chasing the girls after catching them in the act at a nearby graveyard.


Filmed in 1997 (we even see Pete Tombs' indispensable Immoral Tales--which includes a large chapter devoted to Rollin--proudly displayed on an altar at the ruined church) and looking very crisp and HD, it's clear this is kind of a Rollin capstone. After decades of terrible reviews and bad box office, he's now a legend, his films recognized as fine art as well as terrible trash.  Older, wiser, aware of what works and what doesn't, freed from the need to deliver rote sex and violence (and maybe too old to want to anyway), he changes to a macabre sense of playfulness . These girls spin flights of fancy, remembering their past incarnations via books from the nunnery library on Aztec history and French circus magicians (but not in the irritatingly twee way of some French films), as well as the expected graveyard hauntings. On their travels, they encounter various solo-flying versions of themselves--lonely loner monster women (a bat girl who flies over cemeteries at night; a werewolf girl who hides from packs of wild dogs in misty rail yards), each hidden but radiating a strong independent presence via proud explanatory monologues, explaining why they avoid all human contact, speaks to the deadening effect of masculine energy on creative female energy more elegantly than an ocean of rapey backstories.

Best of all, there are no sudden distractions from the front-and-center female friendship--no boys come between them. In the past, Rollin often brings in a Yoko-style pretty boy to come between them, and soon one is killing the other just for trying to kill him for coming between them. We get this little outcome in Requiem for a Vampire, Fascination, Grapes of Death and, in variations in Poland's The Lure (2015) and the Canadian Ginger Snaps (2000). This intrustion fits the fairy tale archetypal motifs at work (you gotta grow up sometime!) but can have a disillusionment aftertaste (that's not why we come to le cine). Instead, well, no spoilers, but f you took the marvelous Baudelaire but shocking but strangely moving climax of another French film with a similar thrust, Don't Deliver Us from Evil and spread it to a whole film, monsieur! No growing up needed.

This incarnation of Rollin seems calmer, happier, less inclined to either moribund emptiness, callow anima pining, or slow burn destruction of innocence. The girls declarations and past life imagination borders on whimsical but stays on the dark side of fairy tales ( Grimm rather than HC Anderson) so it's OK by me. Reality is more or less forgotten--for example, though they're clearly not carrying any baggage, the girls easily produce oversize volumes of magic and Aztec history they stole from the nunnery library wherever they happen to roam, and their experiences with the other magical girls are like mythic encounters in Greek or Brechtian dramedies or Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus. In my favorite scene, one of them has shot and is dying in bed, but the other brings her back to health by vividly describing memories of ancient blood ceremonies (which they claim to have witnessed firsthand) atop an old Aztec pyramid: thousands of hearts ripped out of sacrificial bodies, enough blood dripping down the upon the pyramid steps to color the entire edifice a deep red. The actresses nail the love and transfigurative power of blood with such pure hearted bliss our whole notion of good and evil are thrown in the dustbin. Viva la mort!

PS - Make sure you watch the subtitled version in the original French. I hear the English dub is atrocious.  

10. VIRGIN AMONG THE LIVING DEAD
(1972) Dir. Jess Franco
Arrow, Kino, etc. - in French with English subtitles

Special Note: There are various versions of this film, some with hardcore inserts, some with dream-like slow-mo zombie attacks demanded by the distributor (zombies were very 'in' at the time) shot by Rollin shot them as Franco was busy and didn't want them added anyway. I don't think they detract, though the hardcore sex certainly does. Either way, you can always scroll past.

My admiration for both Rollin's and Jess Franco's works depends largely on whether a film of his breaks through to me in just the right place/mood/time. Often I find them insufferable but late at night when I'm half-asleep or delirious, alone in my chambers, bust of Pallas above the door and all that--magic. Now and then though, the doors between unconscious' dream and dream cinema open, Franco knocks one home and a kind of full scale magic overwhelms me - a timelessness envelops me like molasses and I'm suffused with an enjoyable melancholic delirium, a Rimbaud/Baudelaire kind of drug-like spell where the film and I merge.

I had been sober for a year before discovering his work and was far from an instant fan. This was back when seeing his work involved renting a lot of VHS tapes from the Kim's Video--unattractive pan and scanned unrestored images or worse, terribly faded and widescreen (vs. anamorphic) DVD or VHS. The first DVDs of SUCCUBUS and KISS ME MONSTER were terrible. Half the screen was missing, colors gone. Rather than pan and scan, they transferred by just cropping off the right half of the image so we saw a lot of people in profile talking to the tip of someone's nose. 

Even then, the magic could shine through in the right mood. 

Ah but NOW, now it's all different. 

Before I fall into hazy reverie, let me sum up by saying the films I like/love from Franco are few and far between. The man made hundreds of films and maybe ten are worthwhile: Succubus, Venus in Furs, and Diabiolocal Z  get me excitedly combing my Pete Tombs and Stephen Thrower volumes for a lead on my next big fix. But even they pale in comparison to the haunting elegiac beauty--with a little sex in it--of Virgin Among the Living Dead. It's everything great about Franco and is probably the one best to show doubters who 'don't get it' . A  truly nightmarish vision of an orphan innocence too bereft of parental guidance and starved for family to realize the danger she's in when she comes to her father's remote ancestral estate to hear the reading of his will. She comes to find the chateau occupied by a quintet of strange relatives. Her uncle (Howard Vernon, of course), a deranged bombshell (Carmen Yazalde) who is "one of the family" on some level Christina never quite gleans, a mute dopey but sinister servant (Franco),  and the beady-eyed aunt Abigail (Rosa Palomar).

Clues arise when neighbor boy tells her the chateau has been uninhabited for years; and other locals try to warn her away.  It turns out the Queen of the Night (Ann Libert--the blind bird girl from Franco's Erotic Rites of Frankenstein) is involved, holding them all - including the spirit of her father (Paul Muller) in her sway. Her father's ghost tries to warn her to leave before it's too late--but she's so starved for familial connection she can't. Anyway, she has nowhere to go. Even if they might drink her blood or attack her, she's too starved for familial connection to want to leave. 

Franco's cinematography never misses a natural light uncanny effect (particularly magic hour deep shadows over faces) hinting at the unknowable uncanny nature of even von Blanc's innocent beauty. There are shots and scenes so powerful they rank among the best poetic surrealism in 70s cinema. I avoided this film a long time mixing it up in my head with Erotic Nights of the Living Dead, which I heard horrible things about. It worked out anyway. Seeing it now is 'the right time' in my decades-long international genre cinema journey. 

Maybe that's why films have so much magic and why--in the end--all this paralyzing availability, this endless access to bottomless archives of films, is such a good thing. Fate is able to sometimes able to save just the right movie for just the right moment in one's life, so that art and self intertwine and annihilate each other. In a good way. For 90 minutes or so, we're truly liberated from the bondage of self. 

--++

Hayes of Thunder: THE DISEMBODIED, ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU, GUNSLINGER

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Snaking her unhinged voluptuousness through the breezy soundstage jungles, medieval soundstage forests, hick towns and voodoo graveyards of drive-in independence, Allison Hayes was a special breed of star (aggressively sexual) at a special time (the mid-to-late 50s) for a special place (the drive-in). At her best playing the direct, carnal sexually available wanton, the 'unsatisfied but fixing to change that real soon[ woman, she was a recognizable a face in the late-50s drive-in as Vincent Price or Boris Karloff. She was even in The Unearthly next to Tor Johnson and Bela Lugosi! She straddles the big schlock morass of history Classic genre fans revere her like Christians do Mary Magdalene, and rightly! Here are three of her films not as well known as Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, but all are worth hunting down, if you love strong and slightly crazy women.

ZOMBIES OF MORA TAU 
(1957) Dir. Edward L. Cahn
***

If you ever saw one of those cool plastic pirate skeleton or old-time diving suit aquarium ornaments, the kind with the oxygen bubbles coming up from a small sunken treasure chest half buried in the gravel, and wanted one even though you didn't have you an aquarium, then independent producer Sam Katzman--the B-movie David O'Selznick--has a film for you. It doesn't have an aquarium either. But there's zombies, as you may have guessed. Set in a bayou-like inlet, it's the salty tale of ye cursed crew of undead sailors doomed to forever guard a sunken chest of cursed diamonds. Many have tried over the years to recover the diamonds, all die--and some stick around to join the vigil. The undead captain's now-elderly wife (Marjorie Eaton) lives in the forlorn hope that one day the curse will be broken but the only way to break is "destroy" the diamonds. What? How can you destroy the hardest thing in the world? So she says "get rid of them, throw them into the sea!" They're in the sea already, lady. Tell your writer to think the drink through.

Enter cute visiting granddaughter Jan (Autumn Hoskins) who gets the backstory after her incoming cab runs over a walking dead crewman and doesn't stop to check (proving the screenwriter saw White Zombie). And now another salvage team has come: burly leader Joel (George "Not the same Beatle" Harrison), his trophy mistress Mona (Alison Hayes) and the object of her lust, hunky first mate/deep sea diver Jeff (Gregg Palmer). Cue the flared tempers and aggressive come-ons, especially when Mona gets a load Jan. Mona's so crazy she practically stabs Jan just for giving Jeff a drink of water after he's roughed up by a zombie. 

This movie gets a bad rap (called 'unimaginative' by one critic, "dull" by another) but it's got everything you want for a movie with its gnarly title. Maybe it was badly panned and scanned for TV or just too relaxing to keep viewers awake during late show TV airings back in the day.  Now, in its restored HD widescreen version it's, well, unless you're expecting gut-munching it's got near everything you want in a movie called Zombies of Mora Tau. Then again, maybe I just love this movie because I love that all the underwater scenes are all shot on on a dry set, with the actors just moving really... slow. (with bubble overlays). The result is like one of those Bugs Bunny cartoons where the character starts floating as they get into bed, or some Cocteau through-the-mirror dream effect. It still won't keep you awake, but it will make dreamland a cool, sexy place. 


But probably the reason I love it is Alison Hayes. Treating the old lady with scorn, suspecting their dinner is poisoned, goading Josh into insisting Jeff kiss her ("How dare you say no to a friendly kiss!"), Hayes' sexual energy makes a nice side dish to the zombie mayhem. Before they know she switches side, 'turned',  wandering through the Tourneur-esque shadows in her cinched up nightgown, her knife, bra, and posture stiff as Frankenstein.

Scenes of relentless, slow moving (all-white) sailor zombies coming at the living humans from all sides, never even flinching from point black gunshots, are nicely dispersed throughout. When they're not guarding the treasure they're nosing around on the veranda, looking through open windows, skulking in bushes. Their unstoppable slow momentum, and the moody black photograph  make Tau a key historical zombie link between 1932's White Zombie and 1968's Night of the Living Dead. It's a unique twist having them all be sailors and a crew, and they're a hilarious bunch--though one wonders why they were all buried together in one big above ground tomb with no coffin lids so they can all just rise up and/or bring their victims back to be zombified (by lying down on the floor next to a marble slab in the center of the room). If you can get around the weird nonsensical aspects like the way the whole crew is buried in the same above ground tomb, like a big dorm room, the ridiculousness of the curse--and things of that nature, you'll find it a fine film to help you towards ye old catatonia.


THE DISEMBODIED
(1957) Dir. Walter Grauman
**1/2

Another of Allied Artist's drive-in back-end double bill-fillers. Alison Hayes doing the voodoo shimmy with her ever-present dagger is the main, some may even say sole, attraction. They call her Tonda, the sexually frustrated, voodoo-doll strangling wife (her mixed blood implied by her name and a shellacking of bronzer) of an older German doctor (John Wengraf) who studies transmigration of souls and other voodoo practices. They live deep in the middle of generic Africa, where there's nothing to do but lust after hunky servant Zuba (another white person in bronzer) and try to kill her husband with voodoo dolls. Enter handsome jungle photographer Tom Maxwell (Paul Burke) and his lion-mauled buddy - he needs help! Tonda's eyes light up with lust. But how to save the dying friend? What about the witch doctors of which Tonda speaks? And what about Zuba? Surely a voodoo shimmy and a chicken stab will solve both problems at once. 

In general jungle movies don't grab me, but Disembodied is free of the reasons for that. As far as I can tell it's all shot on one big soundstage jungle compound set, free of bugs, compost, narration, animals, and realism of any kind. Instead there's Hayes really living it up, smoldering her way along midnight verandas, stringing along her sweaty old husband with the occasional kiss, and keeping herself barely amused by strangling effigies of him and dancing at midnight voodoo rituals. "She's the voodoo queen!" says Tom's guide as they spy on the ceremony. 

Zuba's mate Mara (Eugenia Paul) gets vindictive after her man dies; she gets right away that his soul is inside a white dude who, as chance would have it, is now trying to kill everyone for some zombie reason. The gravelly German doctor husband is as surprised as anyone that his mauled-to-ribbons patient seems mostly healed the next day. As one of his buddies notes: "This whole thing is so freaky it gives me the shakes." Move over,  buster.

Competently acted all around, Disembodied is let down by two unforgivable elements: white actors playing natives by wearing bronzer and tooth necklaces, and Hayes' godawful makeup, hair and wardrobe. What moron at AIP decided Hayes' skimpy tribal wear should be a formless black top with a long, concealing black fringe? it's worse than a censor bar (below). Hard to believe this is the same girl who looked so young and alive in Corman's Gunslinger (below) and The UndeadI do like her daytime wear, alternately an Asian-style cocktail dress, and safari jumpsuit, carrying a knife on her belt she has no qualms about using.


That aside, there are good things. I like the low-key natural speaking styles. Tom has that low register downtown New York-accented Actor's Studio-type of inflection; his precise but underneath speaking voice lets you know he's not trying to be a ham--it's TV cop show-style acting. And despite the accursed fringe, Hayes still has that weird air of bitchy carnal aggression that made her so transcendent in all these probably tailor-made roles (she would have been sublime as the treasure hunter-cum-monster in Voodoo Woman made the same year and I think on the same set (1)) She may stray from form when getting all gooey over Tom but she can wring maximum Stanwyickian mileage out of her hatred for her husband, hurling blunt force lines delivered low under breath like, "I could kill you...." like spears through cake. She brings the noir femme fatale energy to every poisoned kiss.

whoever designed this outfit was no friend to straight men

And you can't blame her for being evil: she's horny and  bored, and as the doctor says, "the natives are like children." You can't figure why she'd marry this coded impotent German doctor in the first place, unless she needed to get out of the country. There's no backstory and no sense in in this potted soundstage jungle, but there's good steady drumming, her steamy in-spite-of-it-all allure, and the crisp photography that captures well the shadows of the black soundstage night. Maybe it's enough. Sometimes an eerie night in a "jungle" full of dangers all you need, at least for an hour's distraction. And preferably with that Hayes woman, figure-hiding fringe or no. All it takes to know it's a keeper is the turned-on look in her eyes as she watches Tom and the possessed Joe fight over a knife.

Note lack of fringe and light dress shade
allowing alluring under-shadow in this glamor shot


GUNSLINGER
(1956) Dir. Roger Corman
***1/2
Roger Corman is mainly known for his horror and science fiction films, but he also made four westerns! Gunslinger is his last and best, a gender-reversed Wyatt Earp variation starring Beverly Garland as Rose, the wife of a slain marshal, who pins his badge on her own chest after all the men in town are too chicken to take it (especially the mayor whose cowardice we later learned lost the Civil War for the south). We know we're on for a wild ride when Rose shoots a guy point blank at the funeral.  Instead of the usual 'only the judge may mete out justice' malarkey ---BANG! It's awesome. People get shot right and left, with no fanfare--people just whip out their guns and kill each other dead on the spot-- is refreshing after so many of the more liberal revisionist westerns of the era. Rose has no problem--no female tears or misgivings--about racking up an impressive body count. She doesn't cry, and shake and whine, or refuse to pack a gun cuz killing is wrong. She just whips it out and fires. Good thing, too--her opposite number, Erica (Alison Hayes), owner of the town's saloon/brothel, was behind the her husband's death, and she's way more lethal and vicious. She has a habit of buying land nearby and then sending her lovestruck little lackey Jake (Jathan Haze) to take a shortcut and murder the seller when he rides out of town, retrieving the money and use it to buy another piece of property, etc. Nice trick! Rose becomes Erica's next target when she decides she decides the saloon has to start closing at 3 AM! What? Up until then I really liked you, Rose. Erica sends her lackey to Tombstone to hire a gunslinger fast enough to take Rose out (it sticks in her little man's jealous craw she thinks he's not fast enough to do it himself). He finds Cane (John Ireland) with whom Erica soon resumes a torrid affair of turned-on animosity that angers little Jake even further! And then, while clocking Rose's habits in advance of the big day he shoots her, well, it turns out Rose and Cane of fall for each other! Who'd a thunk it?

In very cool and nicely underplayed and well-written scenes by future Corman regular screenwriters Charles B. Griffith and Mark Hanna, Rose playfully tries to get Cane to change his outlaw ways, undeniably attracted to him at the same time. What a film! it doesn't even matter that, so rare for a western, the skies are overcast and rainy, the ground super muddy, with the actors gamely pretending isn't soaking through their pants when they sit down for picnics or lay down after getting shot. Hard to believe this currently rates a lowly 3.7 on imdb. Are the western fans threatened by the gender revisionism? I usually roll my eyes at girl gunslinger movies as they're either campy, over-blown, or the actress has to let you know she doesn't approve of guns and murder so she can't press the trigger without breathing hard and crying about it. 

Corman is the first and for a long time the only schlock filmmaker who realized he could cast hot capable actresses in the tough guy and scientist roles usually reserved for men. And Garland is a lovely example of how a woman can be alluring and assertive at the same time. In trousers and a cute red bandanna around her neck, she's unique in the annals of all westerns and it's a shame this little film isn't better known. And on the villain side, with her red hair, black velvet choker, tightly pulled corset and form fitting burgundy red dress, Hayes is an angry vision of loveliness and conniving sex as Erica. It's a perfectly written and and conceived role for Hayes, that mix of greed, jealousy, manipulative sexuality, aggression and dark wit is like her trademark--a mix of noir femme fatale and two-fisted drive-in pin-up. And here, the duality between her and the 'good' woman sets the blueprint for another great Griffith/Hana script, my personal Roger Corman favorite, The Undead the following year. 

With none of the liberal guilt-tripping, corny sentiment, or labored symbolism that usually dampens the mood in any 50-60s western (except those by Howard Hawks), Corman keeps the tale lean, sexy and fast. The moral is: if you can't draw fast and shoot straight you better go hide, because death comes quick and sure, and no one asks if it was morally responsible to plug you one. Perhaps the only reason it isn't more widely celebrated today is the title. For a film about two strong, inflexible, beautiful, deadly women--they even have one of the best female-on-female bar fights in film history --why give it the most generic title of western ever With the male characters all subservient and ineffectual---the cowardly mayor, dopey deputy, smitten little bartender/bushwacker, and indecisive gunslinger--it's a woman's world all the way and thus deserving of a relevant title. What about Ms. Gunslinger or Girl Marshall? Would that have worked against it? Because boys is afraid of armed girls? I doubt it!

Though never released on DVD or Blu-ray (outrageous!), it's currently streaming on YouTube. Find it on my public YouTube playlist "4 AM Favorites") right next to another--never been on official DVD or Blu-ray--film, the Dino di Laurentiis-produced, Ennio Morricone-scored tale of a drug-addicted bisexual super spy, Fraulein Doktor. Both feature strong lead women and subservient men See the connection? There are also two 70s TV series about cultures where women are in charge and men subservient--Star Maidens and All that Glitters. There are no streaming. VHS, DVD or Blu-ray releases of them, at all, ever.  Dear video labels, stop being threatened over strong women! Release Gunslinger, Fraulein Doktor, Star Maidens, and All that Glitters on DVD or streaming --or Allison Hayes' ghost is gonna make you cry for mama!


click here for more where this came from! Awooo!


NOTES:
1.  Maybe she was busy making Zombies, 1957 was her big year - she was in 4 films and made six TV shows. wth Voodoo Woman, which used to be on a double bill with The Undead (which co-starred Hayes) so maybe that's why they got Marla English instead (in her second go-round as a woman turning into an armor-plated She-Creature) in the villainess role. Two Hayes in one double feature, the same year may have confused half-watching audiences. But Hayes would have crushed it. (though English is clearly having a ball and is rather marvelous in a pint-sized sort of way. Keep your expectations even lower, and check it out).
2. their names and films shall be unmentioned as they constitute spoilers.) 

Had a Great Fall: Ed Wood's SINISTER URGE (1960), TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE (1970), FUGITIVE GIRLS (1974)

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12 Nights of Ed Wood - Bonus Edition!

The ultimate in strange wretched hypocrisy, jacked past the point of Russ Meyer's satirical sermons, Ed's last two films as a director would, fittingly, be an anti-smut manifesto slathered in cheesecake, rape/murder, soda shop brawls, and elaborate blackmail schemes in 1961, and a smut film slathered in Laugh-in-style sight gags, and cop show witness slap-down improvs. Today we'll look at both, as well as a groovy film he wrote and was directed by his long-time pre-XXX smut collaborator Apostloff, FUGITIVE GIRLS. 

THE SINISTER URGE (1960)

If you've ever read Ed's THE RAT RACE you know he had a gift for capturing the sad tawdry desperation that lurked deep inside the casting couch system. He writes vividly of innocent midwestern girls blindly accepting invitations from so-called casting agents haunting Hollywood's cheaper rental office buildings. Dreaming of stardom, these naive lovelies either hand over a few hundred dollars for never-arriving glossies, and/or offer their virginity for a nonexistent part, only to find the office 'for rent' sign replaced on the door when they visit the following week, having not heard back. If the glossies do arrive, and it's a legit photo studio, how can you pay for them? Take a few risque shots, for the studio's use as 'art'. All the girls are doing it. Then use the photos as a tool for blackmail (threatening to send copies home to mama) to get them to take more, and on and on. 

We get enough of an impression of all this--from the photo shoots to the extortion and blackmail to the slavering rapist enforcer who kills any girl who decides to squeal--in SINISTER URGE, Ed's last black-and-white film as a director. The film's big showpiece is a long chase through the park, including desperate phone booth cry for help and near-rescue as passing motorists just miss seeing her; we get the whole shady setup front to back, so similar to the walk through of Timothy Farrell's drug pusher set-up in Girl Gang it's not hard to make the leap and think Ed may have written all or part of that movie too (its ending is also quite similar to his own script for The Violent Years)

The main issue is that I think they just ran out of money to pay the actors or to finish the film as they wanted, so it wound up that a whole 1/3 of the film seems to be just Ed's drinking buddies Kenne Duncan and Duke Moore, hanging out at their desk in his beloved police station setting, there to, as with Violent Years and Jail Bait, loudly and lengthily lament the sad fate of our misled youth of today, the evils of the smut racket, and the corruption of innocence (the dirty pictures are sold on playgrounds, like drugs). Meanwhile the "smut" we see is so tame it makes the J. Crew catalogue seem like Hustler. And then, the unthinkable happens. Initially just an enforcer for the pornography syndicate, the incited-to-sexual-violence Dino Fantini--he of the insane pompadour, Reid Fleming proboscis and flickering switch--starts rape/murdering all the girls, not just the ones who try to escape or threaten to rat out the organization. 

This is the way it was in the late-50s. Lots of lip service to placate the censors = the height of hypocrisy considering the way Wood's career was headed.

But --as if heralding the start of Wood's decline into tawdry softcore -- Urge deigns to offer plenty of gratuitous sleaze on the side (it's not at the photo studio, that we can see - though who knows with scissor happy projectionists and regional censors), and I don't think Wood ever can quite bring us or himself to the 'good' side of the argument, no matter how many minutes he fills with anti-pornography rhetoric. Anyway, depsite all that, he has a point. As the anti-porn activists worried, the shit does need to keep getting amped up to reach the same fever pitch, just watch any episode of any HBO series. That kind of shit is too strong even for me, a lad raised on the mellow good-natured moaning of Ginger Lynn and Nina Hartley. 

It doesn't end, so much as run out of money - as anticlimactic as you can get. This story has no End, as Sam Fuller's Steel Helmet sang. 

FUGITIVE GIRLS
(aka Five Loose Women)
(1974) Dir Stephen C. Apostolof

Finally free of the hypocritical mandates of the 50s-60s theatrical anti-smut smut film, Fugitive Girls another of the 'gems' directed by Apostolof and written by Ed Wood Jr., was made 14 years later at a time when freedom of expression = loosening censorship = no more hypocritical censor-pleasing empty lip service. Now we have softcore scenes of female-instigated rape (female on male; female on female), hippie exhibitionism, a would-be Manson-esque tough trying to intimidate the girls into joining his impoverished little 'camp-out in the scrub' kinda scene, and most of all, we get five tough broads doing home invasions, beating up a biker gang, beating up Ed Wood himself. In short, it's a tough little picture that looks like a half a million bucks thanks to a breathtaking Vinegar Syndrome remaster and a cool psychedelic title sequence. I can't speak for their other films in the Ed Wood-A.C. Postloff canon but, like that other memorable Apostoloff/Wood collaboration Orgy of the Dead before it, I can vouch that Fugitive Girls is blessed by a crackpot half-asleep magic, the same strong mix of good cinematography,  outrageous 'no human ever talked like this' scripting and game if amateurish acting. Fun, strong characters (the only victimized innocent one in the lot is incarcerated by mistake, but even she gets pretty tough when the chips are down) and a cool Russ Meyer style cop show score that gives their flight from justice a kind of operatic slinkiness. Meyer didn't direct it, clearly, the breasts aren't big enough and the editing is not as tight, but it's got Meyer's same propulsive take no prisoners or no shit attitude- recognizing the Kali blood goddess oomph as if Ed wrote the script a few years after Faster Pussycat, Kill! Kill!

It is gratifying to think Wood was around, still making things like this, however low rent, while Plan Nine and Bride of the Monster played on regular TV across the country. In the days before VCRs I managed to see Bride of the Monster at least three times just from finding it on via afternoon Dr. Shock or Creature Features screenings (depending on if my UHF antenna was tuning in NY or Philadelphia stations). It must have been a bit gratifying for old Ed to turn on his TV during some boozy reverie and see them playing, even if he wasn't getting any royalties. Ed, you were rocking my little childhood world! Take comfort in my giddy rapture. Mixing gothic horror and science fiction- Bela Lugosi AND giant octopi? Vampires AND aliens? I could hardly contain myself. (As a kid watching monster movies I could understand very little of the dialogue--I wanted monsters and mayhem. I'd sometimes slog through a whole hour and a half of talking head tedium just to get to a mad scientist vs. assistant-turned-monster. It was a gyp, but what are ya gonna do? Sometimes I'd get Brides of Dracula or Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, so it all evened out. 

Now of course I have everything on disc. And I often think about what a vast library of titles we'd have from Ed if there has been video cameras back then -- but would they have any value? And what kind of movies would he have made, freed from the demands of producers and distributors, with just an iPhone and a bunch of his willing weird pals? Would he even have done any sex films? Can you imagine if he made a dozen more horror films? Bringing back Criswell and company again and again, but would they still have the same charm? The Cult of Ed can play what-if til the cows come home. In the end, we're grateful for what we have. And you never know what's around the next bend. I'm still praying for The Night the Banshee Cried, the second episode of Ed's proposed anthology TV series (the first being the recently unearthed Final Curtain). 

But for now, we have the sex films, the best of which are directed by Apostloff, such as Fugitive Girls which looks so good via its Vinegar Syndrom clean-up it shines like brand new. 

The five women consist of a bickering redneck and black girl ala The Defiant Ones, who alternately respect and then hate each other; there's the innocent who got arrested after her boyfriend robbed a liquor store with her in the car, and then there's the tough butch leader (Tallie Cochrane) and her innocent girlfriend. 

I like their gradual intense bonding - the Argento-esque lighting inside the car; and their constant onslaught against the males who try to either rat them out or hit on them. 

Wood does a pretty good job as both a local sheriff and also the garage attendant who notes of his gas supply: "This here gas is for the big equipment." He doesn't ham it up too much or mince or prance or fall down drunk or anything unseemly. He is a bit of a dottering drunk hick as the gas station attendant but he radiates real calm assertive energy as the sheriff towards the end. In fact, it's hard to believe it's even him (left). And the climax involves a thrilling final chase with a bag full of recovered loot over and through a construction site and/or a working mine, going up long chutes, swinging and falling down big sand hills, the final two bad girls really go at it and for a sexy film it's surprisingly physical. It's what Manny Farber would call termite art: with no delusions of anyone ever appreciating it or watching that far, these girls really give it their all like a bunch of kids with a super 8mm camera who stumbled on the construction site on the worker's day off and ran around improvising things based on the set up, with no thought to personal safety. You can tell it's the ladies themselves doing all the running and fighting and not cutaways to stuntmen as it's all filmed in long takes. With someone like HG Lewis those long takes might be badly blocked with a nailed in place camera, but not here. Apostloff and his DP know what they're doing--they pick up the camera and follow the action--and if previous versions made it look washed out and shitty, but its day is finally due in spiffy violent colors. Cue psychedelic credits!

Special shout out to Renee Bond as Toni, Talli's dumbstruck girlfriend! 

TAKE IT OUT IN TRADE (1970)

I tried to get into it, for Ed's sake but it's the worst, really - a meaningless collage of softcore scenes cut up with a leering chipmunk-like detective peeping out of bushes in the style of The Immoral Mr. Teas and endless shots of girls walking up and down carpeted stairs. Imagine the worst of the nudist camp era with the worst of the sofctore era and you're halfway there. 

As Joe Blevins points out, the narration sounds like it could be from Wood himself, but it actually Michael Donovan O'Donnell as detective  "Mac" Magregor, hired to find a missing girl (20 years old so legal to do what she wants) by her parents, one of whom is Ed regular Duke Moore. Mac talks almost constantly throughout the movie which is then endless shots of him sticking his big chipmunk face out of bushes with a patented horny voyeur having a ball grin - in order for Ed to use some stock footage of a passenger plane taking off and landing - followed by surreally short and shoddy scenes meant to represent that country (i.e. Paris is represented by sidewalk cafe table with a baguette in front of a poster of the Eiffel Tower).  This gaiety is offset by a series of scenes--the only real reasons to watch the film, actually--with Mcgregor dropping in on various boozed-up lowlifes in their various pads, slapping them around for information on the girl's current whereabouts, even if they've already told them all they know. There's a nice boozy improv feeling of all this stuff being shot on weekends while downing fifths of Scotch but some of the scenes, such as Macgregor slapping around a very gay aesthete, leave a bad taste. The lad seems to be gay but acting up a gay stereotype at the same time, but we're clearly meant to root for him as as Macgregor barges in, starts trashing the place and slapping him around, presuming he'll know where the girl is. We're reminded of all these sad little scenes in movies from this period, where gay people are freaks who endure and probably secretly like getting slapped around by 'straight' men, as if they deserve it, they have it coming, for messing with God's grand plan and impugning masculinity as a whole, or something.

Then, in a long scene both sad and awesome comes the best part: Ed himself appears as one of the jaded party people Mac questions and slaps around. Tawdry but smart in a blonde wig and a green sweater with an orange sweater (not angora, I think, I can't tell) thrown atop it, he answers the door and feed Macgregor (who he knows from some weird past) some apparently cheap scotch. A long-ish scene plays out, presumably improvised. Ed is a wonder, still. I recognize my own boozy performances in his groggy tuned-in state. I can feel the booze haze emanating from his pores and soul. See, when you drink slow and steady for week after week, avoiding your hangover by drinking first thing in the morning, you're like a man being pulled out to the open ocean on a raft, knowing you should be trying the paddle back against the current before it's too late, but unwilling or unable to try. You know you are compounding the interest on your overdue payment of misery and tremors and this compels you to live for the moment as tomorrow will be unspeakably grim. With the rest of your life swathed in black curtain, the moment becomes precious and you move right into it. We can feel that moment-living in Ed, and so it's a shame he has such a flat, one-note chipmunk cheeked imbecile as a scene partner. The vignette ends with Mac ripping off Ed's wig to expose his normal hair, as if proving his own superiority as a real man. As with the earlier scenes of abusing gays and older drunks, it's only funny if you forget the last ten years of social progress, Like all the other people Mac slaps around in his quest for this girl, Ed seems pulled from the bottom rung of the Hollywood skin trade--a crew of alcoholic degenerate filmmakers hating themselves for being different even while flying their freak flag with stalwart defiance. Can hardly blame them for having a weird complex about their own desires and weaknesses. The real degenerate of the film is obviously Mac, and  it's him and we're stuck with his tiresome leering and relentless traveling for the duration. 

Booze, man. You can't blame Ed for seeking refuge in a bottle. For a lot of us, outsider style artists ever-struggling with the thought of anonymity and obscurity (especially in a status-obsessed city like LA, where being a has-been is almost worse than being a never-was as far as pariah status), Ed is like the bottle. We get the same boozy reprieve from the ache of artistic loneliness from both Plan 9 and Ten High whiskey.

But rather than focus on the Ed stuff, making a film of drunken slap-downs, we get endless scenes of softcore groping connected via endless repetition and doubling back. For every prostitute Mac slaps around or fools around with or watches fool around with someone else (his vantage point is never clear -- the sex is indoors on the red shag rug, but Macgregor is peeping out of ground floor bushes towards the camera), we see planes take off and land, girls walks up and down the red shag stairs, postcards arrive in the hands of Duke Moore appraising him of Mac's progress. After one tryst is done and we see some more plane shots, he goes home to his offices in the Brown Derby men's room or the rear of a used furniture outlet to gather his case files (we never see a file or even a desk) and then, figuring out how much more money he can wheedle out of his client, he jets off to "Europe" and back, sending Duke a postcard from the road ("getting close") and watching as more broads in their negligees walk up and down stairs. 

Naturally the final scene is a huge orgy with Mac front and center. Will he alert Moore to where their lovely slutty hippie daughter is "working" - or will he just send them a postcard from sunny Florida that he's following "a hot lead?" Eventually we'll get the answer and find out what the title refers to, but first, let's fly to Europe and back, watch some girls climb stairs, and return to our offices at the Brown Derby Men's room! 

PS - For the definitive word on these and his other films, visit Dead2Rights Ed Wood Wednesdays! The mind boggles at its thoroughness, stunning coherence and contagious delight.

Sexy Occult 70s TV Movie Review Round-Up

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The 70s--such a great time for supernatural-themed TV movies, usually on ABC. These old mellow vibe-casting fading star-studded thrill rides can seem mighty slow and uneventful to today's audiences, but if you get the context, i.e. you were a kid in the age before VCRs and cable--when everything came over network TV, censored, edited, studded with standards and practices alterations and commercials and never meant to compete with the rougher stuff over a the drive-in--then it's a fond and comforting and slightly unsettling blast. These were films meant to scare old folks, parents, and children alike. Through it all, the occult thing soared. As the witchy 70s began, Satanic cults full of the elderly or the very hip Californians fiddled with demonic possession of children and teenagers being harassed by their peers and laying on their telekinetic vengeance; all the time staying close to the witchy occult roots.

Marked by an avoidance of anything like sex or gore, a low-budget, reliance on commercial breaks for pacing (which makes their video and digital versions seem strangely incomplete, as if 'the good parts' are missing)--at their bests these films are classics of comfort food opiate reassurance for a certain generation, and maybe just cool relics for everyone else. B-list character actors from past cult favorites evoke the bygone classics while the scripts dole out just enough scares and suspense to keep dad from changing the channel at the next commercial break.

Here are a few I love or like or at least don't mind. They're all re-edited from older posts here on Acidemic. But I'm working on an all-new post that will cover LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY, KILLDOZER, and SATAN'S TRIANGLE!  

THE CAT CREATURE
ABC - Dec. 11, 1973
Dir. Curtis Harrington

For the classic horror fan by a classic horror fan, a B-star-studded tale of Bast, the Egyptian cat goddess, freed after thousands of years when an amulet necklace is stolen off her mummy by a drunken Keye Luke. All who touch the amulet shall be mauled to death by this mummy cat god woman returned to life. Written by supernatural TV movie veteran Robert Bloch, directed by thew great Curtis Harrington, Cat Creature rocks a dreamy mix of supernatural romance and cop show vibes, spiked with heavy doses of classic horror and Satanist/Egyptian set dressing. And the cast!: Kent Smith (the dope in Cat People) as a murdered archivist; Gale Sondergaard as shady occult book store owner; John Carradine as a flop house desk man; the marvelously creepy Milton Pearson (he played the escaped lunatic in The Hidden Hand) as a coroner;  John Abbott (The Vampire's Ghost) as an Egyptologist. And after each murder..... a cat silhouette!
Investigating detective Marco (Stuart Whitman) realizes the murders center around a missing cat amulet so he recruitst archaeologist Roger Edmonds (David Heddison) and together they tool around LA, talking to each other with their great gravelly TV male 70s smoker voices, searching the flop houses and antique shops. Turned on by the mystery (Agatha Christie is his favorite author, he tells Marco). Roger vibes with the shy cute new clerk at Sondergaard's store, 'Rena' (Meredith Baxter), little guessing the occult connection.

I love the little weird details here: the skulls and weird old Universal horror props in every corner of the frame; the meowing violins, pensive percussion, slow sustains and yowling gongs in Leonard Rosenman's score; the cool-creepy green horror font of the credits: the eerie chanting of the exit music. From the plaster Egyptian 'artifacts' to the autumnal palette, Harrington ensures every frame is a-drip with classic horror fan / 70s childhood manna. Best of all is the way the odd sense of isolation, the superb contrast of run-down LA studio backstreets and Addams Family / Christine McConnell-style posh interiors finds a doomed resolution in the sadness in Baxter's Rena. When she tells Roger of her centuries of being alone in the dark, getting closer and closer to him in a romantic slow gravity pull, you feel just how tempted he must be to take her up on her offer and just go racing out of town, living forever with a cat goddess. Masterfully underplaying as she goes, she conjures a grown-up Amy from Curse of the Cat People- history all set to repeat itself (Rena being clearly taken from 'Irina'). Taking a page perhaps from Lewton, Harrington ably syncs the mellow rhythm of 70s TV to the languid sense of timeless affection that develops between them--evoking that SHE/MUMMY ages-echoing amor. As so often happened with prime time TV movies, despite the cool font and chanting-Morocco-style desert wind fade out, it might end better if you go upstairs before the last five minutes and watch a happier ending safely from the embryonic depths (otherwise it gets a little ridiculous).



 SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS
ABC (1973) TVM 
prod.by Aaron Spelling & Leonard Goldberg)

Future Angels Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson are students at an all-girls boarding school where there seems to be only two teachers: Dr. Delacroix (Lloyd Bochner) goes crazy imparting the secrets of mind control via a relentlessly-squeaking rat maze; and laid-back Dr. Clampett (Roy Thinnes) teaches art and encourages the girls to embrace their own hallucinatory perceptions: "What we think we see is as real as what we actually see." Dude, that was like the mantra of the 70s. The less-cool Delacroix meanwhile talks about how terror makes people irrational and suggestive. Put them together and you can't tell what's real anymore. Anyway, girls are dying--apparently committing suicide if you believe the coroner--and student Jaime Smith-Jackson (who'd just come off Go Ask Alice!) worries she may be next and drops to the hallway floor shrieking in terror between classes for no conceivable reason. Pamela Franklin (the girl-child in The Innocents who'd just come off shooting Legend of Hell House) is Elizabeth, at the school to secretly investigate the supposed suicide of her sister (Terry Lumley) whose ironed dirty blonde hair and red sweater / denim jacket ensemble kick things off perfectly in the paranoid opener. Jackson--wearing devilishly long straight black hair, is the smart angel who helps Elizabeth with the mystery while espousing the wondrous powers of professor Clampett ("he can't help you if you fight him"). Ladd-- full of her patented vivacious charm--is another student who worries about the disappearances and gushes over Clampett. The all-of-a-piece low-key acting (only Jo van Fleet's conflicted headmistress hams it up) and lengthy scenes of crackling thunder and blowing wind as girls walk around in their nightgowns in the dark-- a lantern illuminating their scared but determined young faces--all add up to laid-back 70s TV horror movie heaven, or... the other place...

If it's the other place, Satan, where do I sign?

A smooth occult TV movie prelude to both Charlie's Angels (1976) and Suspiria (1977), this Spelling/Goldberg joint stems from the halcyon days of relaxed morality. Free love and occult practice were mainstream. The handsome male teachers at all-girls boarding schools could host wine parties, and tell the students to "condemn nothing.... embrace everything... and hang loose" and it was all alright. Watch out though --if Satan is around. 



Relative to most horror movies made today, the prime time occult TV movie is totally tame; it's something the whole family can mildly enjoy. There's no kissing or nudity or blood (a few metonymic body parts aside) and best of all, there are only pretty girls and a few adults with liberal attitudes, and old character actors making cameo paychecks. One day, when a first-rate transfer/restoration is undergone, and all that beautiful long straight 70s hair glows like a Terence Malick sunset, me and the seven other people who love this film will chant and dance 'round the altar in ecstatic surrender. Condemn nothing...

CRUISE INTO TERROR
ABC (1978) TVM

Here's a Friday Night TV movie nearly every kid remembers from the tumultuous year of 1978 on ABC.  It's a comforting and distinctly 70s mix of leisurely Love Boat meandering (sunny poolside bathing beauties, sunny Caribbean scenery, marital or other two-handed dramatic scenes playing out amidst the passenger list of fading movie and rising TV actors) and cross-pollinated occultism (Bermuda triangle, satanic possession, mummies) and Poseidon Adventure-style disaster tropes. All very familiar and welcoming, aside from one thing so strange it burned in our memories: the source of the "terror" of the title turns out to a breathing child-size Egyptian sarcophagus! You heard me?

I mean the sarcophagus breathes. I don't mean you can hear breathing inside of it, as if the mummy within is breathing. The whole sarcophagus breathes in and out as it works its evil. We never see inside it--no one opens it. It's just.... already alive. 

In their mad craze to monsterize the landscape, 70s TV movies gave an evil spirit to all sorts of things. There was the possessed stone altar fucking up the elevation of a jumbo airplane via a green puddle on the carpet (Horror at 37,000 Feet), for example. There was also a killer bulldozer (Killdozer). But a breathing sarcophagus on a pleasure cruise to Mexico? I imagine the idea was probably born from some writer dropping acid at the "Treasures of Tutankhamun" exhibit which was then all the rage (i.e. Steve Martin's hit song "King Tut"). Add an ominous synth version of "Dies Irae" as the theme (predating Wendy Carlos' version in The Shining by two years) and you have a memorable night in, sure to help a doped-up, literally cotton-mouthed boy (I'd just had my wisdom teeth out when I saw it) and his six highballs-in dad laugh with giddy joy. 

Robert "Charles Townsend" Forsythe co-stars as a hieroglyph-reading missionary priest on a cruise with his sexually frustrated, lingerie-wearing wife (Lee Meriwether). She needs a real man--not some intellectual deity! In the next cabin in a busy stockbroker (Christopher George) who never has time for his own, also needy, wife (Lynda Day George, Christopher's real wife). Stella Stevens, Lee Meriwether, Jo Ann Harris are also aboard, looking for a quick tryst or just some fun in the sun. And what's this? Noted archeologist Ray Milland is on the ship, headed to Mexico to prove Egyptians left tombs there. Round it up with a random physicist named Matt Lazarus (Frank Converse), a crusty captain Andrews (Hugh O'Brien), and handsome first mate Dirk Benedict (Battlestar Galactica) who knows all too well a good young virile sailor's duty as "the 'entertainment committee" and ready for ye old midnight cabin comings and goings. 

But what is the strange curse hanging over the ship, causing accidents and freak encounters, such as the 'harrowing' encounter between three lovely snorkelers and a "vicious" shark (any child of the Jaws knew right off the shark on display was a harmless "blue"). Then, the ship breaks down in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico, conveniently right over the spot that just happens to be over the very same missing tomb sought by Ray Milland's archaeologist (after Lazarus fixes his math. "Two degrees off our present course!")

What are the odds!? Capt. Andrews can't say no since they're stuck there anyway (no wind or engine)--and now everyone wants to dive for the treasure and be rich! Freak storms and accidents abound. Let's get in the water.

If you're a fan of 70s TV movies then you know the 'disparate slice of multi-generational humanity forced to work together to survive' plot line was almost inescapable thanks to the popularity of Airport, Poseidon Adventure and 1977's Day of the Animals. The decade also loved 'group isolation + prolonged terror = torches and mob rule' humanist critique. Also, there's a much freer attitude about sex, far less judging and guilt or shame. Players like Dirk Benedict aren't depicted as sleazes in need of canceling so much as guys doing their manly duty to please the perfectly acceptable and natural desires of the female passengers. If--in our current climate--you think that can't possibly be true, catch an episode of Love Boat, where the crew are all basically allowed and encouraged by the captain to bed down with the guest stars -- it's practically part of the job! That should give you an inkling of how sex-positive we all were in the 70s, under the pre-AIDS auspices of Dr. Ruth, Erica Jong, and Rona Barrett and 'the pill.'  Mainstream America had what Alexander D'Arcy's gigolo piano teacher in 1937's Awful Truth calls "a continental mind."

That's one reason 70s TV movies are so fascinating, and remain so-- their sexually liberated prime time zeitgeist.

Of course, no sooner has the baby sarcophagus come on board than the cast is going full greedy savage arguing over where to sell the booty and how to split it; it's the evil spirit in the sarcophagus making them do it! It gains in strength the more bad vibes it sows. Its ruby eyes flash and cause sudden storms when someone tries to open or damage it, spooking everyone not already under its malevolent sway. As more and more of the cast become sensually liberated agents of evil, the film gets funnier and freer. A highlight is when Judy snaps at her mousy friend Debbie (Jo-Ann Harris) for being too scared to even shoot a flare gun. ("stop following me around!") It's supposed to be the effect of the ancient evil at work (as in Exorcist) but it feels more like the effect of good, liberating shrooms

So, does a sudden contempt for weakness combined with an escalating attraction to earthly pleasure make one evil, or just cool? Countering Forsythe's bland gospel is Milland ("I do not believe in biblical fantasies!") and the captain (Hugh O'Brien) who tries to explain all the deaths and storms and ship failures as coincidence. Still, there's no arguing with a closed-minded skeptic, and sometimes that's a good thing: "There is a devil --it's in here, all of us, note the captain. "His name is greed, fear and all of the ugly things we can never face." So deep, bro. 

The 70s will all end soon enough, just like the prescription to those sweet child-size opiates I got for my wisdom teeth. The age of Pisces gone deep to Davy Jones', where it began- splattered like a glass goblet on the sidewalk outside the Dakota. 

But was the evil of libidinal freedom vanquished, or was the good of libidinal freedom stifled?


ABC (Dec. 3, 1976)
Spelling-Goldberg Productions

A black magic-dabbling Hollywood star from the 1930s (or 50s? It's never clear) named Lorna Love (Marianna Hill) reaches from beyond the grave to fuck up her married biographers in this priceless 1976 made-for-TV film. Kate Jackson and Robert Wagner play the couple, who move into Love's crumbling mansion (i.e. "Love House") to soak up the atmosphere and groove on the vast cache of mementos and clippings. While Kate finds cult-style daggers lying around and someone in a robe stalks outside her window or tries to kill her with a gas leak, Wagner--like Dana Andrews before him--finds himself falling in love with a corpse, using the thick atmosphere as an excuse to to drink and brood over Lorna's life-size portrait. In a sublimely macabre Hollywood Babylon-worthy touch, Lorna's still-beautiful corpse (or is it?) is even kept on display in a glass case out in the backyard. Her enemies and acolytes alike drift by to spew venom or awe and gaze. It's a pretty toxic scene and poor Kate finds herself behind the 8-ball when Wagner is too out of it to respond to her cries for help.


Though relegated mostly towards playing a gaslit innocent, Jackson looks quite sleek in her silk scarves and slacks, her straight black hair. Her youth all but crystalizes the air around her with fuzzy magic. A smart sweater worn over a collared shirt adds nerdy class to her beautiful 'smarts' and nurturing soul. We feel her pain. She's way too sweet to be deserve being menaced by a phantom in a pentagram-covered purple robe who's either trying to kill her or just scare her out of Love House, and worse to have her husband (son of Lorna's late last live-in lover) dismiss it all as her imagination,

In a funk so many of us can relate to, Wagner drinks booze and moons over the Love 'haunting' portrait (it looks like a pastel drawing that took some ABC art dept. five minutes to dash off0 and obsessively screens her old films via a home projector on the wall, he winds up distracted by conveniently-timed hallucinations of ghostly Lorna whenever Kate's in danger in another room. In the most awesome moment, Lorna comes to life in a slow motion, a gold-tinted mirage, smiling and calling his name from inside the film he's projecting! As someone who--as a child--believed he could make Kate Jackson fall in love with him if he stared hard enough at her picture, I caught the meta frisson from this scene, big time.

 Adulthood is supposed to wake us up from such naive, hopeless wishful fantasies but--as we learn at the House of Love--alcoholism lets a writer sleep on, swimming in the boozy bliss of the projected image. And the more Wagner drinks, the ruder, more patronizing, and dismissive of Jackson's legitimate worry he becomes. He thinks she's faking that someone is trying to kill her--she's jealous of Lorna's spirit or something--and has left a Satanic knife in her drawer and cut her own face out of their author's photo, all for attention. As Kate is so rational and intelligent, you start to imagine what Charlie's Angels would be like if every suggestion, clue, or even event the Angels reported was dismissed by Bosley and Charlie as womanly hallucinations and hysterics. Ick, right? They'd need more than an hour to solve the case, that's for sure... Then again, she should be calling the cops and/or moving out--so her attitude is odd. Then again, these films were always too short to have such plot points. It usually goes a) couple moves into old house b) wife hears strange noises c) husband thinks wife is imagining it. d) repeat (b)-(c) several more times; d) add a guest star as a patient detective walking around in search of signs of a break-in; e) shocking revelation! 

It's a shame there's no good copy of this floating around the internet as it would be great as a remastered WB DVR (the DVD from Cheezy Flix is the same blurry mess as currently on YouTube so don't bother). Old, familiar faces abount, as befits the place and subject: John Carradine is Lorna's old Svengali-style director (he hated her); Sylivia Sydney is the nicotine-voiced housekeeper; Joan Blondell is Love's #1 stan; Dorothy Lamour... OK, I forget what she does. And Marianna Hill is Lorna. You may remember her as Fredo's rebellious strumpet of a wife in GODFATHER 2, an alien in a couple of original STAR TREKs, a track groupie in RED LINE 7000 and the star of the awesome MESSIAH OF EVIL. Hot damn. She's got a cult, all right... (FULL REVIEW

1973 - TVM / CBS

In order to earn the primetime runway slot at the Nielsen airport, a CBS 70s horror TV movie had to triangulate three pop culture trends and make it all work in under 80 minutes. This is why, for Horror at 37,000 Feet, we get: 1) The Occult: A druid curse (an invisible presence) attached to an ancient artifact; 2) Social Commentary, i.e. "the real monster here is human panic"; 3) Disaster movies, i.e. Airport. This last one provides the framework, and its style bracketed a large swath of star-studded 70s TV movies. Passenger lists always include aging 30s-50s stars, aging 30s-50s character actors, young actresses on their way up, and granite-jawed TV actor authority figures like Christopher Plummer, David Jansen, Chuck Conners, or Clint Walker. Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your safety belts and prepare for take-off. Destination: A demonic wind tunnel.

The vehicle is jumbo jet luxury cargo-passenger "airplane" hauling a massively heavy Celtic altar exhumed from its sacred grove in Ireland (which we never see). A small passenger list is dwarfed by the vast interior; the downstairs storage freezes; a dog is frozen solid. A bunch of icky green goo bubbles up through a reverse leak from below, And then, the plane becomes suspended at 37,000 feet, trapped in a crossfire of winds, providing an ingenious explanation of why the plane interiors never once give the impression of movement or it being anything but a breakaway set. Luckily the stewardesses all wear hot white go-go boots and the booze flows free (to keep the passengers mollified). Too bad the only hard drinker is an unbearably smug William Shatner as a self-defrocked (what else?) priest, who sews a button on his jacket, sips from a big silver flask, and generally carries on like he doesn't quite know how to play 'drunk, fatalistic and bitter' so just shouts and sulks a lot. His delivery of a groaner line like "I didn't lose my faith - it lost me," makes one long for Richard Burton's drunk priest in Exorcist II. 

The cast is solid and notable or eye-rollingly cliche to the point of originality: Chuck Connors and Robert Forster are in the cockpit. Tammy Grimes is the wild-eyed crypto-pagan who knows all about the altar's colorful human sacrifice-enriched past and that the spirit can only be calmed again by a blood sacrifice of one of the original clan's descendants, i.e. Jane Merrow, whose rich architect husband (Roy Thinnes) insisted on bringing the altar to the US in the first place; Lynn Loring (with a Mia Farrow-in-Rosemary's Baby-style short red hair cut and big teary eyes) is Shatner's panicky wife; Paul Winfield is a mild-mannered physician who lacks the strong speaking voice of a natural moral leader for the panicking passengers. Shatner does (but he doesn't want the job); Buddy Ebsen (Jeb, move away from there!) is a cranky Texas millionaire always ready with a homespun witticism and naturally is one of the first to grab up to symbolic pitchfork and torch, alongside fellow hick-made-good Will Hutchins. Playing a western B-cowboy coming back from Italy (ala Rick Dalton!) with a terrible towhead mop top wig, garish red rodeo shirt, Hutchins has a habit of shouting all his lines (his attempt to flirt with a nameless female passenger is painful). Add a child and her dolly (they sacrifice the doll as an effigy!), burning books to stay warm. They're going to run out of gas stuck up there in mid-air! As Forster says to Connors: "Here, take another pain killer. No point in saving them." Shatner realizes he can terrify Mrs. Pinder by waving his Zippo lighter in her face. ("Fire.. To burn witches!") Yikes! He's not very PC --he even sneers at people who "believe jimson weed will make them immortal!" Dude, no one who does jimson weed would ever think that. But Shat should know, having helped teens recover from the withdrawal symptoms of LSD-addiction in Go Ask Alice. 

I ain't complaining about how bad it is as far as continuity (such as a single shot wherein Shatner is seen wearing a priest collar and vestments instead of his civilian sweater and jacket during his long walk to the back of the plane), I love it for its idiocy. It represents a kind of uniquely 70s TV movie zero point wherein some smoke and bubbling green and white house paint wafting up from a hole in the carpet and the occasional Val Lewtonian shadow substitutes for any kind of monster or concrete threat. The strange fascination with sub-zero temperatures on a plane (just touching the door makes pilot Chuck Connors' whole arm go numb) goes well with the array of locked-in ensemble types waiting for their chance at a terse "Why doesn't somebody do something??!" outburst. Playing like the under-rehearsed confusion of an off-off-Broadway audition, it seems like something written by Rod Serling's slow-witted nephew, who, incidentally, has never actually flown on an actual plane. Brrooooom! Brooom! 

It all works because as bad as it is, it moves pretty fast (especially without commercials). Fans of Italian horror can luxuriate in the Bava red lights of the cockpit and everyone can appreciate the wild-eyed hysteria with which Loring rises to the occasion, furiously cutting off Jane Merrow's hair to stuff in the child's doll and wrapping it up in her clothes. ("And some of your fingernails!") before burning it. When that doesn't work, it's time to actually sacrifice Merrow! Great hammy stuff with Shatner wobbling around drunk and all the actors wondering what else to do in this under-rehearsed single set shoot to 'portray' their types. 

Those of us who were around in the 70s and remember when this first aired are far less likely to care about that the film can no longer hide its poverty in an analog cathode ray blur.  We love it for its faults. I was seven but still remember laughing with my dad over the monster being essentially a pile of melted green ice cream with someone blowing bubbles up through it. For me this is as precious a memento as a family album. Maybe more so. In short, if you saw it back on ABC in '76, it's a must-see as an adult. If only Satan's School for Girls or Death at Love Housewould one day get the same respectful remastering HD treatment.  (FULL)



THE BERMUDA DEPTHS 

ABC - Jan 27, 1978
Rankin/Bass Productions


A kind of oceanic ghost story, Bermuda Depths sails the same currents as Curtis Harrington's Night Tide, Corman/Hellman'sThe Terror, and even the doomed romance between Bonehead and Lorelei in Beach Blanket Bingo. Maybe it's because I'm a Pisces, but I love it more than all of them put together. Shot on location in beautiful Bermuda with crystal blue skies,  crystal white beaches, clear turquoise water, coral reef footage--all humming with moody folk love song theme (courtesy Rankin-Bass), beautiful young lovers dripping with salt water, mostly tranquilized sea levels and oceanic temperatures, and giant (and I mean giant) turtle occasionally rising like Moby Dick x Gamera to bump his head on an unconvincing helicopter, The Bermuda Depths pulsez with Jungian archetypal symbolism and heavy myth/dream power. The film as a whole lingers in the mind like one of those dreams so good you almost wish you never had them as the longing to return to it makes you weep and lament all the rest of the week (because you never get it back... ever).

Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca) appears at first like a distant black flame, framed in the picture window of a rocky outcrop (below): walking closer through the eye of the island to a rock where Michael Pitt-lipped wanderer Magnus (Leigh McCloskey - the dislikable EPA guy in Ghostbusters) doth nap. The heartbreaking guitar of Vivaldi's "Concerto in D major for Lute and Strings RV:93 Largo"plays as eh gazes down at him with loving eyes (is he dreaming her?), evoking a stirring flashback of their time as children on that same beach, raising a giant sea turtle together, even carving a heart with their initials on its shell. One day, while also napping, he woke up to find her swimming away on the turtle's back. He almost drowns trying to swim after her. That night his marine biologist dad decides to conduct some ominous experiment in a grotto under their beach cliffside house. In response, an unseen leviathan knocks half the foundation on top of him while Magnus frets upstairs in his childhood bed. So many questions, but save them. Let it flow.

Everything is just right, free of any voiceover trying to situate the imagery-- no words spoken for the first 12 minutes of the film- only Vivaldi, and that achingly lyrical folksy theme song already burrowing into our souls and leaving us with a plaintive spiritual ache for our own lost ocean animas.Jenny....

Magnus, now grown, is back in Bermuda. He and Jenny meet again, along the day-for-night shores; we're as obsessed with her flawless raven-haired beauty as he is. But he's only back in Bermuda to do a stint on a marine research vessel helmed by Burl Ives and Carl Weathers, two marine biologist collaborators with his Magnus' late father. Ives is researching gigantism in ancient triangle species, i.e. a turtle the size of a football field, i.e. the animal familiar of Jenny, or maybe a guise of the Devil, her master, dictating her relentless lure of smitten sailors to the briny depths... of the Bermuda Triangle. She's an unsinging siren! 

Note similarity in outline of the rock to his hatted head as he sleeps,
Jenny emerging from his pineal gland, or where land meets ocean;
maybe the most beautiful photographic image in the history of Jungian archetypal symbolism?
(female/dream/ocean vs. conscious/man/sky.
ABC Friday Night TV movies like Depths made deep and lasting impressions on children like myself (I was 12), who had no voice in the prime time choices. Lucky for me my dad loved this kind of shit (unless football was on). We all loved In Search Of...so a movie this weird and wondrous couldn't be missed. Somehow, though, I did. I have no memory of it. What else would we have been watching?

After its initial premiere, this weird intensely haunting film lay dormant for decades, gradually considered to be a folk myth, so different was it from everything else on TV. But decades later, through the giant claw machine of the Warner Archive, it has been dredged from the depths, and it is a treasure. Though only a TV movie, its filmed on location and Bermuda has never seemed so beautiful. Jerry Sopanen's brilliant cinematography evokes, among other things, Dali's magical paintings of Costa Brava. We can even see the sinews gleaming in shirtless Weathers' beautiful black shoulders (more)


BAFFLED!
NBC (1972) 
Dir. Phillip Leacock

One of those pre-X-Files TV movies that could function as a possible pilot (if it's a hit) or just a TV movie of the week (if it's not). This one pairs Leonard Nemoy as a former race car driver turned psychic by a track accident concussion with smart Brit investigator Susan Hampshire to explore the possible crimes yet to happen. Both are headstrong and quick thinking -- what a team! She has a trenchant investigative zeal and he has weird flash forwards to strange murders somehow tied in with an a secret occult group. "The House of the Wolf." 

BBC costume drama darling Hampshire is a very cool chick: animated, assertive, fearless, funny and forthright, bouncing around the spooky scenes in her 70s peasant frocks until a a bewildered Nimoy can't help but laugh in fond admiration. Nimoy seems to be having wry fun breaking out of his stoic Spock persona but hes still otherworldly looking even without the ears. Set largely on old estate-turned-lodging run by character actress Rachel Roberts, the guest include Vera Miles as the woman Kovak sees in his premonitions--she's falling out of an attic window to the rocks below! Her daughter (Jewel Blanche) comes under the sway of her absentee father, a totally terrifying Mike Murray, who gives Nimoy a run for his money in Satanic countenance. Murray rocks the cruelest haircut I've ever seen, and a glint in his eye that could freeze lava. He is supposed to be dead or missing but he shows up in the greenhouse in an attempt to convert his and Miles' daughter to the dark side with the help of a mystic wolf amulet. 

Richard Hill's score is strangely bouncy when it should be scary and scary when it should be bouncy, but the subtextual mockery of human emotions is invigorating if you like cop show pumping. We get lots of fancy British cars driving around the grounds to make sure that aspect of Nimoy's character fits in (with some adorably unconvincing rear projection thrown inside the vehicles). And most of all, I like that the chemistry between the actors and the characters is there but without that 'sexual' awkwardness we get in much of today's similar fare. Instead they're allowed to focus on the mysteries, and bond in intense platonic ways that paradoxically were much more common in the 70s when sex itself was more liberated and therefore less of a big deal. 

For a weird double feature with another co-ed psychic and investigator duo teaming up to prevent a calamity in some town in the middle of nowhere), check out Lucio Fulci's CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD. (1980).

Occult TV Movies of the 70s, Part 2: LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY, SATAN'S TRIANGLE, GARGOYLES, KILLER BEES

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Like many Gen-X-ers who grew up watching 70s network TV with the family, I am a child of the occult. The TV Movie of the Week on Friday nights, the ABC Tuesday Night Movie, or whenever,  and sometimes NBC, and even other times, CBS, this was our arcane nourishment. The devil, telekinesis, witches and ESP all blasted into our collective ken via the adult box office--Rosemary's Baby, The Exorcist, The Omen, and Carrie--and filtered down to the kids through watered-down TV movies and lurid covers for paperbacks we were too young to read yet (though we tried). Ouija boards were sold in toy aisles from Sears to the local 5&10. We pretended crosses would burn us and that we could be telekinetic if we concentrated hard enough. We revered the name of Adrian (used in both The Omen and Rosemary's Baby, Adrian became to default name for Satan's offspring, male or female).  In hindsight, the occult seemed a natural outgrowth of late-60s hippie fashion--post-Manson but pre-Satanic panic--the frocks and robes, the colors, symbols, flowing garments, pagan statues, strange tapestries, drugs, incense and candles--it was all there in the wind. Even my own aunt lived in a commune. I still remember walking through all the beaded curtains as a six year-old kid, seeing all the cats, all the mattresses on the floor, all the long-haired dudes smoking... whatever they were smoking, hearing the weird music and seeing how horrified it made my parents to see it. I loved it. 

That was the 70s, man. Evil wasn't evil unless it was threatened. Don't bully Adrian, or us, and no one dies from floating knives. 

LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY
ABC - October 29, 1976

Yea, though I only got to see the first half hour or so, I remember LOOK WHAT'S HAPPENED TO ROSEMARY'S BABY (1976) vividly as it infested my childhood dreams like a pleasurable fever for weeks. And I remember the flak it received the next day at the playground from the kids whose parents let them see clear on to the bitter end. I only saw the first 1/3 and it was amazing. Adrian getting burnt by the cross, what an image. I don't know why that was such a turn-on to my nine year-old brain. I imagined having telekinesis and being allergic to churches for years afterwards. We all did. 

As a grown-up, though, the bad reviews this TV movie has made me stay away for decades. I finally saw it only last week (as I'm in the midst of a 70s TV movie phase) and was in paroxysms of tacky so-bad-it's-sublime joy from beginning to end. I mean, Patty Duke as Rosemary, shouting "Why?! WHY?" to the heavens ala her memorable final scene in Valley of the Dolls? Rosemary hiding out with five year-old Adrian at a run-down Jewish funeral home, shouting at the scattered old mourners to "Pray! Pray! Pray!" while the evil Castavets try and locate her and Adrian with their minds? Rosemary freaking out in a trailer with worry Adrian may have killed two kids, serving him milk with one hand while preparing to knife him with the other? Winding up trapped on a Satanic greyhound with no driver? And that's all just "Book One!"  It's all downhill from here, but what a ride!

Book Two flashes forward ten years or so. as Adrian is now played by Stephen (Pontypool) McHattie, whose wide, curled smile and hooded stare simultaneously evoke Rutger Hauer, Bo Hopkins, and Jonathan Turkel (what a combo). He drives fast, lives at a mansion/casino with his Satanic guardian (Tina Louise), i.e. the devil's den, but has a Christian (angelic) best friend named Peter (David Huffman) who keeps urging him to pray in church instead of lusting after women (there's a definite gay vibe). Most importantly, Peter urges him to flee his corrupting guardian before his big 21st birthday, as if sensing the ceremony in store. For some reason Adrian can wear a cross against his skin now, and he contemplates it like some strung-out Jesus freak (whereas in Book One he was burnt by one - no explanation how he's suddenly immune, then again a lot of stuff goes unexplained here). It's weird that the Christ option would be subversive, but we're in the devil's house--there's gambling!--cute cocktail waitresses, decadent paintings, slot machines (the only evidence of gambling) and rock bands seemingly 24/7. 

Of the original cast, only Ruth Gordon returns, as the sweet old lady Satanist Minnie Castavet; Ray Milland takes over as her husband, Roman; George Maharis takes over from John Cassavetes as Rosemary's no-good (now ex-) husband Guy, who is now a big star in LA. He's told by the Castavets he better come to the casino for Adrian's birthday, as he is needed for a big ceremony, which will either initiate a full possession from his father the devil and/or they will sacrifice him, and then his body will be inhabited by the devil. Or something. Like a lot of this movie, details seem vague and contradictory. 

Well, even if it's never very clear but who cares? I love that Milland and Gordon are dressed like, and for the most part behaving like, ordinary elderly tourists coming to visit Guy in LA, then trekking out to the casino like retirees to Vegas. I love that while Adrian's Satanic ceremony goes on in one room in the casino, right through the door there is a band rocking out and assorted young people dancing, oblivious, as if it's nothing more than a craps game. The association is that rock music is evil, that the devil is seeming to draw power from it. These old folks are, in short, cool/. Roman even tokes a joint (he has to "stay with the times")! 

Throughout the three "books" the set and setting is always unique, strange, not quite right, as if the art direction was done by a fundamentalist Christian schizophrenic after six rewrites. For example, it's jarring to see Adrian argue with his guardian and/or Roman in the other room at a weird Satanic initiation then leave and walk right back into the casino/bar (basically a typical TV bar/restaurant set, but adorned with big unmanned slot machines), full of guests and/or gamblers, where his Christian boyfriend sulks at the bar and keeps pushing him to leave. You would think for something this important the Satanists would at least like to study the guest list. The best they can do to get rid of this white-wearing buzzkill (he "flunked out of divinity school") is have him be attacked by a falcon in his car (falcons were very 'in' at the time). But that's not a debit. I like the feeling of disassociation, as it's very dream-like.  Though the circulating print is muddy as heck, the Book One scenes of Rosemary dragging Adrian down dark, deserted, windy city streets has a surreal, almost Argento-esque interiority about it that ramps up the spooky real nice. There is never the feeling we're in any definable reality, especially when nearly everyone Adrian runs into, aside from Peter and his mother, seem 'in on it.' Who is this weird Christian Adrian is hanging out with, and why do Rosemary and Adrian run without thinking twice into the trailer of Tina Louise in Act One? Is she a relative? In Book One, why does child Adrian take to the street at Roman's telepathic command, only shout his own name to the heavens? Did the writers forget (since Rosemary prefers to call him "Andrew"?) But who cares, really? If you can let go of the bad writing, and whatever you do, don't expect it to measure up remotely close to the original, you can fall into a swoon at the sublime mess that is. 

The 21st birthday party/ceremony is the real showstopper--and your reaction to it will indicate whether you like this movie as much as I do. In order to prepare Adrian for his magical rock and roll birthday initiation/possession, the Satanists first drug him, then lay him out on the dining room table, and paint him up like a glam rock mime. I kid you not, right down to the white face, red cheeks and lashes.  Once this is done, McHattie does a ridiculous kind of 'stick puppet with loose strings' mime performance (indicating the devil not being used to moving around in a human body, one presumes) before sashaying out of the room and into the dancer-packed other room, where the band is getting down and dirty. ("Let him go to the music," counsels Roman). In a cool tracking shot, Adrian dances his way through the throng and up to the stage where he stars blankly out at the crowd and does a weird little two step rock shuffle (believe it or not, McHattie actually lends his spastic dancing scene a certain level of pouty Jim Morrison meets beatnik Frank Gorshin cool). 

The Christian boyfriend, meanwhile, sensing what's going on, in a kind of Footloose-prefiguring moment, tries to unplug the amps and stop the party! Stop the music! The sight of this white clad idiot freaking out and trying to save Adrian's soul by running up, unplugging the amps and telling everyone to stop dancin is so deadpan ridiculous it has to be meant tongue-in-cheek, like some Jack Chick tract enacted by the Anton LaVey players. The music keeps going, even without the cords, and Peter is ushered outside, where he's electrocuted by Guy and ends up being thrown against the window like a lit-up Christmas angel on the electric cross, right where Adrian is doing his devil strut/dance! Adrian-- made-up like a glam rock mime, and succumbing to the devil's music--gazing at his friend plastered against the window, all lit up like a tacky electric Jesus (see top). What a moment! I jumped out of my easy chair and started singing Satan's praises.  

 Book Three finds Adrian in an insane asylum withamnesia (blamed for Peter's death). A cute doctor/nurse (Donna Mills) looks after him. He's got fragmented memories of who he is, and has some idea he can work some mystic powers if he escapes, but the place--run by the cult--is locked up tight. Or so it seems. It's pretty easy to escape with Mills' nurse's help, though, in fact we go right from her agreeing to help to them driving away and eventually hooking up in a hotel tryst.  Meanwhile the forces of Roman and Guy are converging. They either want Roman's soul or his body or something and it leads to a rather anticlimactic motel parking lot hit and run. Or does it?

So what if it Peters out? And of course, if you come to it looking for a legit sequel there's no doubt you'll roll your eyes. But come to it expecting a hilarious WTF extravaganza, and be delighted for all eternity.  Sure, the writing is inconsistent and fractured. Sure, we never learn a lot of missing pieces. Then again, that was part of the uncanny aspect of the original: we only ever saw things from Rosemary's point of view and as kids we understood very little of it --other than that old people are creepy and we shouldn't trust them. The deals and so forth were all done behind her back so everything is inferred (and on TV, no doubt, the dream/ceremony/rape was severely cut). As kids we didn't like Rosemary's Baby -- too slow and adult. We didn't get it, but we assumed there was something to get, that maybe we'd get when we were older, so we respected it. As kids, you give adult occult movies a pass, since you presume there's something there to get, that you're too young to be getting. But now that we're adults we can look at LookWhat's Happened to Rosemary's Baby and know that it's not that we don't get it, but that there's nothing there to get. And that's everything. 


McHattie as Adrian (note subliminal devil horns)
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SATAN'S TRIANGLE
ABC - January 14, 1975

Satan's got a triangle / so big and so wide (at the hypotenuse). A lot of Gen-X TV movie bloggers were awakened to the 'call' of film criticism when this film scared the hell out of them as kids. Kindertrauma's Unkle Lancifer for example relates a very vivid and relatable tale of how screwed up it made his sleep patterns for months (here). Me, I never saw it in its original airing that I know of. Since I was only eight I probably had to go to bed before the ending even if I did, and without the ending it all kind of just goes nowhere a kid might willingly follow. In fact, the first twenty minutes of the film consists solely of watching two Coast Guard pilots (Doug McClure and Michael "Let's be careful out there!" Conrad) circling over a floundering yacht and then lowering McClure down in a little basket as the sound of the chopper blades soothes and lulls any boy who would have been me, and the whole thing has a laid-back kind of procedurally organic flow that modern movies would never have the patience to detail today. But that was what made the 70s cool: McClure and Conrad are actually up in this chopper, for real, and someone, either McClure or a stunt man, really is being lowered in that basket. Today of course it would all be done with a green screen, doubtful there'd even be a real helicopter. But in the 70s, they're going to do it real, we're going to see the minutiae involved with strapping in and lowering down one Doug McClure from an aloft chopper onto an apparently deserted yacht. 


Eventually, after surveying the corpses scattered about on deck and below (one of which appears to be floating), McClure heads down to the main cabin and swills some scotch with the one survivor (Kim Novak!), the dazed mistress of a now-deceased millionaire sportsman and the sole survivor of this ill-fated deep sea fishing excursion. What is the incredible story of how this all happened? An approaching front necessitates the chopper depart until the next morning. McClure sleeps over on the craft so Novak will have some time to tell the tale, and let nature, booze, candles and the seducing sound of the waves work their magic in the process.

Bermuda triangle mystery movies with ghost ships and one survivor to tell the tale in flashback were a dime a dozen in the 70s, but here it's the cast and the moodiness that make it one of the more memorable TV movies of the whole era. It's got everything -- casual sex, Satan, helicopters, lightning and storminess, a seductive and very adult mood (horror movies were still aimed at a mature adult instead of teenage demographic), strange macabre 'accidents', Catholicism (i.e. a priest, either doubting his faith or us doubting his), a sublime and eerie mood, fading A-list and stalwart B-list actors, and a sick downbeat ending that leaves audience with a shiver rather than a sense of balance restored. I like that the interior of the yacht looks like an occult book store and that Novak pours Scotch like a man and wears a vaguely witchy purple Von Furstenberg-style peasant dress (with a cross necklace). Her flashbacks to the millionaire sportsman (Jim Davis) who chartered the yacht (whose mistress we presume she is) first find him angry at having to give up a hooked marlin to rescue a priest (Alejandro Rey) drifting out at sea in the distance. He's very competitive. Dios mio! The sailors insist they pick the man up but almost immediately regret it ("from the moment he came aboard," notes Novak, "a strange lightning started"). Soon they're lost "a hundred miles from anywhere, no radio, no engine..." And all because a priest? What's going on and how did the ship he was on last sink? Either way, they're trapped on a boat in the middle of nowhere--aren't we all? 

The crew abandon ship. The rest of those aboard die one-by-one until just the priest and Novak are left. She makes a play for the priest, but he clings to his moldy faith. He's tempted, though! Or is he just interested in her soul?  Either/or, soon he's dead, when deciding he needs both hands to shoot a flare gun from high on the mizzenmast (he must not have heard of muzzle velocity). 

What a tale! After mansplaining all the freaky occurrences and deaths as merely the result of storms and bad luck, McClure proves he is no priest, and that no moldy Coast Guard vow prevents him and his rescued citizen from getting it on. This was the 70s after all, where sex was something consenting adults might do together after a few drinks and no professional impropriety or awkwardness after (i.e. the encouraged crew-passenger trysts on The Love Boat). But sudden surprises await the dawn!

Though never dull--even that 20 minute opening chopper circling--it's a long slow burn for a truly nightmarish pay-off that would have scared the dickens out of me as a kid just as bad as it scared Unkle Lancifer had I been allowed to stay up late enough to see it. Good sportsmanship prevents me from revealing the disturbing secret. I can tell you that there's a cool weird kind of seductive spell going on even in the more placid moments, and it's all really shot out at sea, at least the exterior stuff is, and even in the cabin sequences you can feel the boat rocking (so often in 70s TV boat and plane interiors you never get the sense you're anywhere but on a motionless sound stage).  That final image: those eyes and that smile, linger in the mind forever. Just know this: if there is a devil, that devil transcends duality in a way that is either problematic or progressive depending on the color of your state. Red or blue makes no difference to the trickster, the agent of chaos, the breaker of ranks. Surrender to him and live forever!!  Or die! Die! DIE, like the uptight post-AIDS prude you are. In five years it will be the 80s so either way, you win.  

GARGOYLES
CBS - November 21, 1972

No one comes to prime time TV movies for the climate. To save money, the sand-blasted scrub of LA (Bronson Canyon in particular) becomes the setting for 90% of the exteriors shown on prime time, especially in the 70s. Gargoyles is no exception - what is exceptional is just the high tolerance for weirdness that makes it totally unique unto itself (not part of any particular trend), the fractured narrative, strong characterizations, unusual father-grown daughter central relationship, ponderous dialogue, ridiculous climax, and almost Cameron-esque fast, kinetic action movie-style pacing. Cornel Naked Prey Wilde stars as the toupee wearing dad who travels with his daughter (Jennifer Sisters Salt) to a remote desert locale where Gargoyles (weird bird/lizard-like humanoids) are breaking to retrieve the skeleton, causing fires, climbing over Dr. Mercer's car as he and Diana try to run and generally mayhem-ing it all over the town's gas station and hotel parking lot. The problem is, Wilde needs evidence, a habeas corpus, and they don't like to leave their dead behind. You won't know how to root for as the dad risks their lives refusing to part with his gargoyle memento mori. Eventually the head gargoyle (Bernie Casey) whisks Diana off to the secret gargoyle cave (Bronson, I presume) and demands she teach him to read. Cue backstory as the book they use is all about... you guessed it... gargoyles. 

Bernie Casey as the head gargoyle
If you've driven ever, way out in the middle of such a place, then you know just how scary and desolate it is, with or without a cannibal clan stalking you -- the afternoon heat is enough to kill you within hours if your car should break down far from shade. Heat exhaustion and dehydration could set in long before another car drives by. In such a place lives 'Uncle Willie' (Woodrow Chambliss) an old drinking man who keeps a strange horned humanoid skeleton he pieced together out in the wilderness in his garage. Whaaat? Soon live versions of this monster attack (in a scene evoking The Terminator) to reclaim the bones. Funny that the central conflict involves Mercer's refusal to part with, first the skull, then the corpse of a gargoyle who tries to retrieve it (he needs it to prove their existence). Before long Diane is abducted by the lead gargoyle (Bernie Casey) who forces her to teach him to read. You heard me. 

Even if the gargoyle suits (early work by future legend Stan Winston) aren't terribly convincing (one looks a bit like Sam the Eagle from The Muppets), each one is different and they are fun in a strange sort of way. It would have worked better had they been able to stay in the shadows, building up mystique, but there's no time. Within hours of meeting Uncle Willie we're zipping along in the momentum of, say, The Terminator or Jeepers Creepers (a film that seems to owe Gargoyles some kind of debt, i.e. a winged demon creature who only hatches periodically, like a cicada, and who pursues a male-female pair across the middle of nowhere). 

Grayson ("Don't make me take steps, Mr. Shannon!") Hall is great as the boozy motel manager knows right where the sheriff keeps his whiskey bottle and grabs a belt after running into his office before relaying her shocking story (gargoyles trash her place trying to get their bodies back). Scott The Right Stuff Glenn is a cool, helpful biker, whose gang joins the search to rescue Diana along with the sheriff and a few deputies on horseback, with dogs, trundling through the heat of the desert following gargoyle scents, climaxing in a pretty wild, hair battle that evokes, in more ways than one, a western with white man vs. Native Americans. Pretty crazy stuff, all in all, with the LA desert doing its magic work as far as creating a sunbleached sense of desolation and post-macho self-reliance  Apparently temperatures out there topped 100 degrees during the shoot, which makes those poor stuntmen in those heavy suits all the more heroic.  

I don't remember Gargoyles' initial airing (I was only five) but I did catch it on an early Saturday morning creature feature UHF channel a few years later. I remember being confused by the dialogue (the lead gargoyle talked way too much) and unimpressed by the monster suits (especially the ridiculous unflapping bat wings that somehow manage to lift these heavy characters off the ground). Maybe my expectations were too high (I'd heard it was sooo scary). And--for better or worse--the mythology and orientation of these creatures doesn't add up: how can they lay such giant eggs when they're normal human-sized? Are they the good guys --oppressed and attacked for no reason by humans throughout the centuries?--or bad (their big plan is to multiply exponentially and wipe out humans as the dominant race on the planet)? We're supposed to feel warmth when a child gargoyle hatches and is welcomed into the arms of its parent, but then root for Scott Glenn to burn them all alive? I didn't get it. 

Now, all grown up in the age of CGI, I'm much more forgiving. In fact, I like the red gels in the caves and that the gargoyles are neither all good or all bad. It's very 70s to be so even-keeled. It's not didactic or preachy (humans kill everything different) or black-and-white (we kill to avoid being killed) as much as emblematic of the complexities of our natural and unnatural order, or something. Maybe we'll never get the 70s back again, but thanks to YouTube, we can knock a few back with Grayson Hall, and cheer the posse of bikers, cops, and bewildered locals as they ride off into the hellish 100 degree heat, all in the name of saving humanity by wiping out a small tribe of disenfranchised outcasts. 

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KILLER BEES
Dir. Curtis Harrington
ABC - Feb 26, 1974

In case you were born in a barn, Curtis Harrington is one of the guiding lights of the 'old battleaxe' post-Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? horror genre, giving work to dozens of older stars throughout the 70s in TV and big screen films reference and revere the Hollywood classics (especially Hitchcock's) while lighting them up with hothouse soap histrionics, ala Lillian Hellman or Tennessee Williams. Everything is never all that it seems with Harrington. Sometimes he can get downright ridiculous (as in Devil Dog: Hound of Hell) but he can also approach the cultist sublime (The Cat Creature). Here we're supposed to get a typical 70s killer bee attack movie (ala The Savage Bees and Terror from the Sky), but instead we get the tale of a matriarchal-ruled family winery, with Gloria Swanson (the part was written for Bette Davis but her doctor vetoed it) as the hammy South African matriarch (her ill-advised Nordic-sounding accent really shows up her limitations as a sound-era actress) who sees that their vine's tender grapes--brought over from South Africa by her own ancestors--are well-fertilized by her own stock of African (i.e. killer) bees. No one who messes with Swanson or her dynasty is safe from bee attack, nor is anyone who even witnesses something they shouldn't.... outside the family that is. But what can the suspicious sheriff do, arrest the bees? And now her prodigal grandson (Edward Albert) is visiting with his new girlfriend (Kate Jackson), and Swanson feels quite threatened! Part Jessica Tandy in The Birds (only with bees) and part Morbius in Forbidden Planet with his monster from the Id, Swanson and her bee familiars have a special bond indeed and she's very possessive of her boys. 

That said, Kate isn't going anywhere and kudos to Jackson and Harrington that her character is never quite 100% trustworthy despite Kate pouring on that signature warmth. In the Harrington-verse, every woman has a killer inside her--even Kate Jackson--has a gold-digging sociopath as well as a warm-hearted angel inside her.  Not cowed at all by the threats and coldness in the air, she tells Swanson her pilot father taught her "how to maneuver around in tight places" and basically shocks her into having a heart attack during one of their tete-a-tetes. Soon Swanson ("how harmless are our little bees") is dead and when Kate presumes she was killed by the bees that covered her body the boys all laugh and we hear their laughing echo in Jackson's paranoid ears. And at the end, well, we're not really sure who Kate Jackson's character is at all. And it's clear from these boys' attitude just how relieved yet flummoxed they are by their sudden freedom from their domineering matriarch. Only what of the bees? What will they do now? 

No spoilers but it all leads to a truly surprising great ending that steers this particular killer bee TV movie far afield from the traditional eco-horror/disaster movie variety and more towards something like The Godfather or Now, Voyager. With his keen camp sensibility, Harrington is just using the public's then-pervasive fear of a killer bee invasion as a jumping off point, to make a chamber piece about family and trying to become an in-law, but with bees in it. And if you've felt, as I have, that The Birds should have ended without news reports that the birds were attacking everywhere, taking the matriarchal 'monsters from the id' angle out of the equation in the process, then you'll love Harrington puts that angle right back in.  These bees aren't multiplying and running amok across the country. In fact they're not going anywhere. And to survive all you have to do is stand very still. As her funeral ends in a massive bee attack (a great moment has an altar boy swatting at a bee with his big golden cross) the three brothers just wait until everyone else has run off and just walk casually out of the church, talking like nothing happened.  

With dialogue written and spoken in a very tight pattern of back and forth, kind of Mamet-like, this quick-moving film offers very little in the way of empty small talk--nearly every line has multiple meanings--helping deliver the movie over many of the usual boggy bumps that often reduce soapy TV movies with rich bitch dynasties down to one small murder or haunting before each commercial followed by more denial and gaslighting in between (with boggy sheriffs and endless puttering). This one moves so fast it seems like a short. (Dear Studios, please remaster and release this movie so it's not just a YouTube smudge, which is currently the only way to see it - Amen)

Hurrah, say I, for Curtis Harrington, the Tennessee Williams of 70s horror!

FURTHER TV MOVIE VIEWING/READING:


To find all these movies and more online, visit my specially curated YouTube List: 70s TV Movies of Death!

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